Introducing Parrot-GMP

Hello!

My name is Bob Kuo (irc, cpan, github: bubaflub) and I'm a Google Summer of Code student. My project aims to provide Parrot bindings to the GNU Multiple Precision Arithmetic Library (GMP - http://www.gmplib.org). GMP is an free and open source multi-precision math library and provides functions for integers, decimals, and rational numbers. The project aims to initially just bind the integer functions and provide full documentation and tests. Beyond these I'll have some higher-level objects written in Winxed for a more object oriented and more convenient approach.

There are two immediate benefits to having GMP bindings available for Parrot: first, multi-precision libraries are a necessary foundation for other important libraries like cryptography or higher-level math; second, higher-level languages implemented on Parrot will get a BigInt and BigDecimal functionality for "free" (for certain values of free).

The end goal is to have a distribution hosted on github that has full documentation and tests, a few examples, and is installable through distutils.

I'm open to any comments, concerns, and criticisms and loiter on #parrot - let me know what you think!

CPAN - http://search.cpan.org/~bubaflub/
Github - http://github.com/bubaflub/
Project Homepage - http://github.com/bubaflub/parrot-gmp