[Verse-dev] Verse encryption woes

[Emil Brink]

On Tue, 08 Feb 2005 16:18:14 +0100
Kaos <kaos at explosive.se> wrote:

> How about the bignum lib?
> See http://www.swox.com/gmp/
> 
> not sure about the portability (i.e. to win32) though.. :/
> But there should be lots of helpfull code to look at, at least :)

Thanks. I knew about the GNU Multiple Precision lib, but have avoided
it because of the license. I believe that the GNU LGPL that it's
licensed under is not compatible with the BSD-ish licensing we use on
the Verse core.

>From reading a little bit about it, I can't remember why that is,
though. Hm. I'm not 100% sure of this at the moment, but it's late
and I'm at home, just wanted to acknowledge the suggestion. Perhaps
Eskil has something to say, here?

One obvious disadvantage GMP has is portability, but also size.

It seems there are Win32 builds in the wild, but the official site
doesn't mention anything about it and I'm not finding much from a
cursory glance at the package's contents either.

When it comes to size, the latest GMP release is 1.6 MB when compressed
using bzip2. It's 728 C source files, totalling 112,405 lines of C
code (with a further 17,000 lines of headers). That's a lot, which is
kind of a problem since I believe the license precludes just ripping
out the parts we actually need. Plus, doing so would be a maintenance
nightmare, of course. My (performance-challenged, heh) bignum code is
roughly 1,000 lines, in one C file and one header...

So... To summarize, I'm not sure if GMP fits our needs very well. From
a "the world runs Unix" perspective, I'd love to just depend on it,
but that's not the way of the Verse core at the moment, unfortunately.

Regards,

/Emil