[GiNaC-list] GiNaC as the symbolic manipulation engine in Sage

[Richard B. Kreckel]

Hi!

Burcin Erocal wrote:
> - It takes ages to build
> 	The packages above took ~25 minutes to build on my desktop
> machine (15 for cln, 9 for ginac)

What is the reason the Sage project is so focused on compilation time?

BTW: The best way to improve that would be by improving GCC.

> - cln seems to support on only gcc, which might be a problem for the
> windows port (which will be using ms compilers)

Oh, a good patch would be more than welcome!

> - cln duplicates functionality which is provided by different libraries
> already distributed with Sage (mpfr, mpir, flint) at a considerable
> speed penalty.

There are areas where MPFR beats CLN speed-wise, and vice-versa. But 
there is definitely no "considerable speed penalty". And both libraries 
sit on top of GMP's MPN layer and benefit equally from any improvement 
there (like better x86_64 code).

Cheers
    -richy.
-- 
Richard B. Kreckel
<http://www.ginac.de/~kreckel/>