On Tue, Oct 20, 2009 at 3:00 PM, Paul Moore <p.f.mo...@gmail.com> wrote: > 2009/10/20 Stefan Krah <stefan-use...@bytereef.org>: >> Hi, >> >> as some of you know, recently I've released an arbitrary precision >> C library for decimal arithmetic together with a Python module: >> >> http://www.bytereef.org/libmpdec.html >> http://www.bytereef.org/fastdec.html >> >> >> Both the library and the module have been tested extensively. Fastdec >> currently differs from decimal.py in a couple of ways that could be >> fixed. The license is AGPL, but if there is interest in integrating it >> into Python I'd release it under a Python-compatible license. >> >> >> There have been several approaches towards getting C decimal arithmetic >> into Python: >> >> http://bugs.python.org/issue2486 >> >> >> Fastdec follows Raymond Hettinger's suggestion to provide wrappers for >> an independent C implementation. Arguments in favour of fastdec are: >> >> * Complete implementation of Mike Cowlishaw's specification >> >> * C library can be tested independently >> >> * Redundant arithmetic module for tests against decimal.py >> >> * Faster than Java BigDecimal >> >> * Compares relatively well in speed against gmpy >> >> >> To be clear, I would not want to _replace_ decimal.py. Rather I'd like to >> see a cdecimal module alongside decimal.py. > > Why? If it's 100% compatible with decimal.py, just replace it. All the > user should see is improved speed. Let's not do another > pickle/cpickle.
For example other python implementations might decide to use python version as long as builtin version does not appear. Python versions are usually also better targets for jit than mixed versions. C level versions also usually have more bugs (just statistics), so some people might want to choose pure-python version. In general - some people have some reasons. Cheers, fijal _______________________________________________ Python-Dev mailing list Python-Dev@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-dev Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com
