Scott Bronson wrote:
On Wed, 2004-06-30 at 00:14, Ion Alexandru Morega wrote:Yeah, it sure would. Maybe we could include it only in release versions, not in the CVS tree? Or use an unmodified (easy to update) version of the source?
... there are advantages in including the source code:
- GMP's compilation process is aware of the machine's hardware, making optimisations accordingly. It should be compiled along with parrot, for better performance.
That's a double-edged sword. GMP's compilation process is complex and
includes a large quantity of platform-specific code. Merging this into
the Parrot tree and then trying to maintain it (and continually merge
new changes) sounds like a headache.
One of the things I like about Perl (and Parrot) is that they try to be as independent as possible from the system's libraries. This includes any shared libraries already installed. Relying on the presence of GPM as a shared library seems to break that. And building without it gives you an incomplete parrot, as bignums are part of the core.
alexm
