[Python-Dev] Optionally using GMP to implement long if available (original) (raw)

"Martin v. Löwis" martin at v.loewis.de
Tue Nov 4 06:45:44 CET 2008

Martin> On Windows, the GMP binaries would be incorporated into Martin> pythonxy.dll. This would force anybody providing a copy of Martin> pythonxy.dll to also provide the sources of GMP.

As I understand it the proposal was to allow people to substitute GMP for Python's long implementation. Just deliver binaries with the Python long version if you don't want to distribute the GMP source.

Ah, as an option, it could work.

OTOH, it should be no big deal to drop a zip archive of the GMP sources which correspond to the code bound into the DLL.

How would end users then extract the sources from the DLL? How would they learn that they even have them in the first place?

Also, people would complain about the increase in size - it's 3.2MB as a zip file (1,7M as .tar.bz2).

OTOOH, doesn't Windows support dynamic linking? Can't pythonxy.dll dynamically link to a gmpMN.dll?

How would that help in not having to distribute the source? Dynamic linking still requires that the code is available at run-time.

Regards, Martin

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