[gambit-list] Are faster bignums important?

ben at fuhok.net ben at fuhok.net
Wed Mar 30 00:13:32 EST 2005


I see.  That could be annoying, particularly since one mostly wants to
interrupt gambit when it is either in a loop or when it is sweating
through some big calculation.  I suppose checking for polls manually
in the FFT is impossible or too ugly to contemplate ?

Ben


On Tue, Mar 29, 2005 at 11:07:05PM -0500, Bradley Lucier wrote:
> 
> On Mar 29, 2005, at 10:22 PM, ben at fuhok.net wrote:
> 
> >What's the downside?  I'm all for increased performance of course.
> >Fast code is one of the reasons that I'm interested in Gambit.
> 
> One downside is somewhat technical, but users can run into it.  Marc 
> can correct my naive interpretation of what's happening.
> 
> Gambit manages its own interrupts; first it masks the ^C interrupt, and 
> if you hit ^C while a gambit process is running, then Gambit only stops 
> when it hits a POLL statement in the generated C code.  POLL statements 
> are put where the Gambit Virtual Machine (GVM) is in a known state, so 
> the debugger will work, give a correct backtrace, etc.
> 
> Any C code for the FFT will not have these POLL statements, so you will 
> not be able to interrupt an FFT that could take several seconds (or 
> minutes, for very large integers) to finish.  You can pause it with ^Z 
> and then kill it, but that's about it.
> 
> Brad
> 



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