GMP news

[Torbjorn Granlund]

In about a month, the GMP web server will move to a new site with more
bandwidth (from 512 kbit/s at my father's summer house, to 1 Gbit/s at
KTH!).  At about the same time, the GMP mailing lists will be migrated
from the swox.com domain to the gmplib.org domain.  This is the last
step of de-associating GMP with my little software company!


We plan to release GMP 4.3 in the first days of January 2009.  It
might get delayed, but I'm working very hard to get it done by that
time, since after that I expect to be too busy for a few months.  The
code is in a pretty good shape already, but I would like to commit a
few more nice improvements!

There are some preliminary GMP 4.3 gmpbench results from the present
development code at http://gmplib.org/gmpbench.html.  Nice improve-
ments, aren't they!  (The clock frequencies of some test systems have
dropped since 4.2, please scale the results to make a fair comparison!)


After GMP 4.3 is out, and the machines have moved to KTH, we hope to
be able to provide read-only access to the GMP repository.  We
switched to the Mercurial distributed version control system last
summer, and that's what we will use for the public repository.


Since I made the last major GMP release, my situation has changed
radically.  Until February 2008, I maintained myself as a software
consultant and hacked GMP on evenings and weekends (but many evenings
and weekends!).  Since March, I am a PhD student at KTH (The Royal
Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden) with GMP as my main
research area.

Another nice result of this is that I'm starting to get better under-
standing of mathematics, something I will use to improve GMP.  As you
probably know, there are 3 kind of people in the world, those who can
count and those who can not count.  :-)

(Funding for my GMP work comes from The Centre for Industrial and
Applied Mathematics (CIAM).  See http://www.ciam.kth.se/ for more
information about CIAM.)

-- 
Torbjörn