Re: [Caml-list] Num library

["Yaron M. Minsky" <yminsky@CS.Cornell.EDU>]

Num is by all accounts a pretty mediocre bignum implementation.  There's
also mlgmp, which is an interface to GMP.  I haven't used it, but GMP is
fast.  There's also Numerix, which I have used. Numerix at least at one
point was a good deal faster than GMP in many cases, and is very easy to
use.  I'm not sure how GMP and Numerix compare in terms of speed these
days, since GMP has seen more development and Numerix has not.
y

> Hello,
>
> Alain Frisch a écrit :
>>
>> Hello Caml List,
>>
>> I'm considering using the Num library (from the standard distribution)
>> for implementing numbers in an interpreter. Questions:
>>
>> - Is there any benchmark available ?  What is the overhead when
>> dealing
>>   with "small" integers ?
>>
>> - How does the library compare with other large/rational numbers
>>   implementations ?
>
> I made some benchmarks with Dolphin Smalltalk (a pure Smalltalk
> bytecode interpreter) and O'Caml (using ocamlopt) a few months ago. To
> my great surprise, Dolphin Samlltalk outperformed O'Caml by a factor of
> 4 over various tests IIRC. I think the same results may be obtained
> with other modern big numbers implementations against O'Caml's one.
> The context was the following: I had to rewrite a program that performs
> symbolic manipulations from Smalltalk to O'Caml and this benchmark was
> the first thing I did to test O'Caml's performance (I was a little
> disappointed!). Finally, despite O'Caml's poor performance over bignum
> computations, O'Caml outperformed Smalltalk by a factor of 100 over
> "real world" benchmarks! (because only a few percents of the time is
> spent in bignum calculations and most of the time is spent doing
> substitutions etc.).
>
> Sébastien.
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-- 
|--------/            Yaron M. Minsky              \--------|
|--------\ http://www.cs.cornell.edu/home/yminsky/ /--------|

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