Dear list, It is my pleasure to announce release 1.0 of Zarith, a new OCaml library for exact, arbitrary-precision arithmetic on integers and rationals. Zarith was written by Antoine Miné with a little help from me and feedback from Pascal Cuoq.
To download: http://forge.ocamlcore.org/projects/zarith/ The implementation uses GMP (the GNU Multiple Precision arithmetic library) to compute over big integers. However, small integers are represented as unboxed Caml integers, to save space and improve performance. Big integers are allocated in the Caml heap, bypassing GMP's memory management and achieving better GC behavior than e.g. the MLGMP library. Computations on small integers use a special, faster path (coded in assembly for some platforms and functions) eschewing calls to GMP, while computations on large intergers use the low-level MPN functions from GMP. As a consequence, Zarith is much faster and more space-efficient than the Big_int module from OCaml's standard distribution. Additional niceties of Zarith include: - short function names and infix operators, allowing one to write e.g. Z.(~$2 + ~$5 * x) - polymorphic comparisons (=, <, >, etc) work correctly on Zarith's big integers, provided OCaml 3.12.1 or later is used. Feedback is welcome, preferably through the bug tracker at http://forge.ocamlcore.org/projects/zarith/ Enjoy, - Xavier Leroy -- Caml-list mailing list. Subscription management and archives: https://sympa-roc.inria.fr/wws/info/caml-list Beginner's list: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ocaml_beginners Bug reports: http://caml.inria.fr/bin/caml-bugs
