[Chicken-announce] [ANN] Numbers 3.1 released [Was: Re: [ANN] Numbers 3.0 released]

[Peter Bex]

On Sat, Oct 04, 2014 at 09:23:26PM +0200, Peter Bex wrote:
> The performance of various operations (notably number reading and
> writing, division and ratnum operations) has been radically improved,
> and is now competitive with many common Scheme implementations which
> are not aggressively optimised for number-crunching.

I've just released numbers 3.1 which improves performance by a wide
margin for bignum multiplication (using Karatsuba's algorithm for large
numbers, and using shifts when multiplying or dividing by powers of two).
String conversion is also faster for powers of two.

Most calculations involving ratnums will be much faster as well; we now
use Lehmer's GCD and I've fixed a stupid mistake that caused it to
perform too many division operations when normalising ratnums.  This
release also fixes one or two bugs.

I'd really appreciate it if people could test this.  I expect to release
one more version before working on a patch for integration into CHICKEN 5.
So, hopefully we'll get a full numeric tower for Christmas! ;)

Cheers,
Peter
-- 
http://www.more-magic.net