GNU Multiple Precision Arithmetic Library

Article summary

GNU Multiple Precision Arithmetic Library (GMP) is a free library for arbitrary-precision arithmetic, operating on signed integers, rational numbers, and floating-point numbers. There are no practical limits to the precision except the ones implied by the available memory (operands may be of up to 2 32 −1 bits on 32-bit machines and 2 37 bits on 64-bit machines). GMP has a rich set of functions, and the functions have a regular interface. The basic interface is for C, but wrappers exist for other languages, including Ada, C++, C#, Julia, .NET, OCaml, Perl, PHP, Python, R, Ruby, and Rust. Before 2008, Kaffe, a Java virtual machine, used GMP to support Java built-in arbitrary precision arithmetic. Shortly after, GMP support was added to GNU Classpath, as the backends to java.math.BigInteger and java.math.BigDecimal . The main target applications of GMP are cryptography applications and research, Internet security applications, and computer algebra systems. GMP aims to be faster than any other arbitrary-precision arithmetic (big number) library for all operand sizes. Some important factors in doing this are: * Full words are the basic type for all arithmetic. * Different algorithms are used for different operand sizes; algorithms which are more efficient with large numbers are not used when dealing with small numbers.…

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