[erlang-questions] or?

[Richard A. O'Keefe]

On 22 Jun 2008, at 10:56 pm, Alpár Jüttner wrote:
> Does erlang implement some kind of fast multiplication algorithm for
> bignums?

Looking at emulator/beam/big.c, it does not appear so.
However, that's something that could be changed without
affecting anything else in Erlang.  I note that the Open Solaris
sources include a fast integer multiply, though oddly enough,
not in libmp.

Of course, I was thinking of floating point operations, not large
integer ones.  Arguably I _should_ have been thinking of large
integer ones.

I note that the performance of the large integer operations in
Squeak Smalltalk was substantially improved in response to the needs
of cryptography, and suspect that long term, there might be a similar
need for Erlang to have and to be documented as having efficient
large integer arithmetic.