GNU Multiple Precision Arithmetic Library

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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 in the machine GMP runs on (operand dimension limit is 2³²-1 bits on 32-bit machines and 2³⁷ 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 the Wolfram Language. In the past, Kaffe, a Java virtual machine, used GMP to support Java built-in arbitrary precision arithmetic. This feature has been removed from recent releases, causing protests from people who claim that they used Kaffe solely for the speed benefits afforded by GMP. As a result, GMP support has been added to GNU Classpath.

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 bignum library for all operand sizes. Some important factors in doing this are:

• Using full words as the basic arithmetic type.
• Using different algorithms for different operand sizes; algorithms that are faster for very big numbers are usually slower for small numbers.
• Highly optimized assembly language code for the most important inner loops, specialized for different processors.

The first GMP release was made in 1991. It is constantly developed and maintained.

GMP is part of the GNU project (although its website being off gnu.org may cause confusion), and is distributed under the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL).

GMP is used for integer arithmetic in many computer algebra systems such as Mathematica and Maple. It is also used in the Computational Geometry Algorithms Library (CGAL) because geometry algorithms tend to 'explode' when using ordinary floating point CPU math.

GMP is needed to build the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC).

Video GNU Multiple Precision Arithmetic Library

Examples

Here is an example of C code showing the use of the GMP library to multiply and print large numbers:

This code calculates the value of 7612058254738945 × 9263591128439081.

Compiling and running this program gives this result. (The -lgmp flag is used if compiling on Unix-type systems.)

For comparison, one can write instead the following equivalent C++ program. (The -lgmpxx -lgmp flags are used if compiling on Unix-type systems.)

Maps GNU Multiple Precision Arithmetic Library

Language bindings

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See also

• MPFR - library for arbitrary-precision computations with correct rounding, based on GNU MP
• CLN - a class library for arbitrary precision
• MPIR - a fork of GMP with mostly compatible interface which aims to provide MSVC-based compilation system for Windows platforms

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References

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External links

• Official website

Source of the article : Wikipedia