GMP 5.0.1Edit

Created , updated

From the official release announcement:

A new release of the GNU Multiple Precision Arithmetic Library (GMP)
is now available.  The new release is identified as 5.0.1.

The new release can be downloaded from the main GNU ftp site:
 bzip2 format: ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/gmp/gmp-5.0.1.tar.bz2
 gzip format:  ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/gmp/gmp-5.0.1.tar.gz

These files can also be found on a GNU mirror near you.

The 5.0 release series contain a very large amount of new code, and
countless improvements to existing code.  There are also a large
number of changes between 5.0.0 and 5.0.1, to fix certain regressions.

The amount of new code means that there might be more bugs in GMP 5.0
than in most GMP releases in the past.  We therefore still maintain
GMP 4.3 and advice users concerned about stability to use the latest
release from that release series.

While GMP bugs do happen, the absolutely most common cause for
incorrect computations with GMP is bugs in the compiler used for
building he library.  It cannot be said enough times: Please run "make
check" after you've built your library.  And if "make check" stops
with an error, do not use the compiled library.  When this happens,
you've almost surely run into a compiler bug, not a library bug, since
we've of course made sure the library passes its own test suite.  The
first thing to try at this point is using a different compiler.  See
also http://gmplib.org/.  Of the more recent GCC releases, version
4.3.2 is known to miscompile this GMP release on all 64-bit platforms;
this manifests itself at a check failure in tests/mpz/t-root.c.


The GMP 5.0 release series would not have been possible without the
very devoted work of Niels Möller and Marco Bodrato.  As usual,
Torbjörn Granlund coordinated the development and release, and did a
fair amount of development work himself.


Changes between GMP version 5.0.0 and 5.0.1

 BUGS FIXED
 * Fat builds fixed.

 * Fixed crash for huge multiplies when old FFT_TABLE2 type of parameter
   selection tables' sentinel was smaller than multiplied operands.

 * The solib numbers now reflect the removal of the documented but preliminary
   mpn_bdivmod function; we correctly flag incompatibility with GMP 4.3.
   GMP 5.0.0 has this wrong, and should perhaps be uninstalled to avoid
   confusion.

 SPEEDUPS
 * Multiplication of large numbers has indirectly been sped up through
   better FFT tuning and processor recognition.  Since many operations
   depend on multiplication, there will be a general speedup.

 FEATURES
 * More Core i3, i5 an Core i7 processor models are recognised.

 * Fixes and workarounds for Mac OS quirks should make this GMP version
   build using many of the different versions of "Xcode".

 MISC
 * The amount of scratch memory needed for multiplication of huge numbers
   have been reduced substantially (but is still larger than in GMP 4.3.)

 * Likewise, the amount of scratch memory needed for division of large
   numbers have been reduced substantially.

 * The FFT tuning code of tune/tuneup.c has been completely rewritten,
   and new, large FFT parameter selection tables are provided for many
   machines.

 * Upgraded to the latest autoconf, automake, libtool.

There is a public repository for GMP, please see the GMP web site at
http://gmplib.org/ for more information.

Torbjörn's work on GMP is sponsored by Stiftelsen för Strategisk
Forskning, through CIAM at KTH, http://www.ciam.kth.se/.