GMP 20 years

[Will Galway]

Congratulations!  Looking over my old files, it seems that I first tried 
GMP in 1992. I have no recollection of how I first "discovered" GMP in 
those pre-web-browser days! ;-)   It looks like Ididn't begin serious 
use of GMP until circa 1996, and much of my research since would have 
been impossible without it.

Thanks for all your great work over those years!

-- Regards, Will

On 03/10/2011 03:24 PM, Torbjorn Granlund wrote:
> The first change log in GMP is dated 1991-03-03, and the initial public
> release happened in September of the same year.
>
> So finally, GMP is no longer a teenager!
>
> I wrote GMP because there were several bignum libraries of questionable
> quality at the time, and many research projects in computational number
> theory or computational algebra started with writing a bignum library.
> I wanted to create a library that would allow researchers to start at a
> higher level, and then also give them better performance.
>
> Back in these days, a 32-bit multiply instruction took from around 20
> cycles to around 40 cycles, and CPU clocks were about as many MHz as we
> have GHz today.  Today a 64-bit multiply instruction takes just 2 cycles
> on the best processors.  All-in-all, hardware developments have allowed
> GMP to be perhaps 40000 times faster.
>
> Today GMP has become used in more places than I could imagine back in
> 1991.  The usage has grown, but as with any software project, source
> code has also grown substantially--the initial release's tar file was 50
> kbyte while the latest release's tar file was 13 Mbyte.
>
> About 25 people have contributed to GMP directly over the years--but
> thousands of people have contributed to GMP indirectly by submitting bug
> reports.  Thank you all!
>
> Now, let's look forward to another 20 years of GMP development!
> Extrapolating, it will have become 3 Gbyte of source code at the end of
> that period...
>