I apologise if this seemed rude. I should have made the point more subtly. I'm just trying to deal with it in an open way. David has taken clear exception to the use of MPIR in Sage by default, and some of his points are valid.... for the time being.
But I want to be clear that MPIR is not going away and that if David's intention is to try and stamp out MPIR now while it is still not completely clear what advantages it will ultimately provide, his efforts will be wasted. I would save him that effort, especially given that the window of opportunity to do this is actually quite small. It was fully expected that GMP would temporarily have the jump on MPIR in a number of significant areas. Fully expected, and there were few surprises. The fact that they virtually threw everything they had at us, whether polished or not, was a surprise. One clear advantage of MPIR. It runs natively on Windows. Obviously that matters a lot to Sage. When and if GMP is prepared to deal with this, then David has the chance of making a case. Until then, there is no case. To take any other attitude is ignoring the elephant in the room. Virtually every contributor to MPIR has tried to get improvements accepted into GMP and failed. David Harvey managed it, but at the cost of signing over his copyright, having an organisation not directly involved in the project decide the license and having his code become so inextricably intertwined with that of TG's that he could not contribute it to both MPIR and GMP as he initially intended. Further, the GMP maintainer's attitude to native support for Windows is a matter of public record. The mandate for the MPIR fork of GMP is as strong as ever. It won't be going away, and I would save David from wasting his effort on trying to make it go away. I don't have any objections to making a GMP spkg, except the obvious. It is fundamentally wasted effort in comparison with just helping us improve MPIR. That said, if David wishes to provide support for GMP for Sage users, so long as he is prepared to do that work and not just expect someone else to do it, then +1 from me. It isn't my intention to alienate David, and never has been. Instead, I wish to prompt him to realise that Sage can gain a lot from the success of MPIR, both financially, in terms of platform support and ultimately I believe in terms of ultimate performance goals. I don't wish to appear to presume anything, but it is also my strong opinion that MPIR is a much more faithful representation of the Sage way of doing things than GMP is. If it isn't, help us to make it so by contributing. We currently have five people committed to making significant code improvements over the next year or so and the help of Mariah Lennox, Michael Abshoff, Jeff Gilchrist and from time to time, various others in relation to build and testing issues. We also have the prospect of some really significant funding for MPIR in the not too distant future and have been provided with significant resources for build testing of our code on hardware. But the project is not currently suffering from being over bloated. We can handle more contributors and look forward to them signing on. The more people that contribute, the quicker we will realise our goals. We already provide significant advantages over GMP in some areas and there is plenty more of that to come. People too easily forget that just one week ago, the tables were completely reversed. MPIR was *significantly* faster than GMP and still had all the other advantages over GMP such as native Windows support. All of a sudden, after two years, GMP does a release, and almost overnight David Harvey thinks it is reasonable to suggest that MPIR should be abandoned in favour of GMP. Come on, be reasonable! Bill. On 22 Apr, 07:58, Nick Alexander <ncalexan...@gmail.com> wrote: > > Seriously, it looks for all the world to me that you are intentionally > > trying to kick MPIR while it is down, knowing full well that a > > comparison is unfair at this point. I expect that by October/November > > this year we will match GMP feature for feature, and that will be > > regardless of whether another release is made. On top of that we'll > > have a whole load of new stuff GMP doesn't have. I promise you, we > > have some really, really nice stuff on the way, e.g. parallel code is > > one of the main new focuses, and development of that will start in > > about 4 weeks. Will you support us in October/November when there is a > > clear reason to do so? > > > In the mean time, how about letting us get on with our work. Better > > still, how about contributing your improvements to *both* projects. > > Bill, David, > > We're all friends here. Let's not let this escalate. > > Nick --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ To post to this group, send email to sage-devel@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to sage-devel-unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel URLs: http://www.sagemath.org -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
