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Date: Sat, 21 Jun 2014 12:02:15 +0100
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To: Andrea Faulds <ajf@ajf.me>
Cc: PHP Internals <internals@lists.php.net>
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Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] [DRAFT][RFC] Big Integer Support
From: danack@basereality.com (Dan Ackroyd)

Hi,

An interesting RFC, that could do with some fleshing out. In particular:

What is the behaviour when you add 0.5 to a value that is a bigint?

What is the behaviour when a bigint zval is used in an extension that
is then going to then pass it to an underlying library that is
expecting a 64bit value? Will all the extension authors need to start
casting and/or checking the values?

There are quite a few functions in the GMP library, which presumably
are useful in handling bigints. Are these going to be exposed to
users? If so, how?


Most of all though, it could do with a stronger argument for why
handling bigints 'automagically' like this is preferable to handling
them explicitly. Without great care for handling them, dealing with
very large numbers is still going to fail at some point. Although
handling integers as bigints explicitly is more code to write, it's
also results in more understandable behaviour, which seems better to
me than having more internal converting of types which is not visible
in userland.


Finally, the RFC should probably address the licensing issues that
would be involved in making GMP an integral part of PHP, not just for
how PHP is distributed, but also for how people making and
distributing PHP applications would be affected.

For reference the GMP library is dual-licensed under GNU LGPL v3 and
GNU GPL v2.0. As I understand it, these are not compatible with the
PHP license.

cheers
Dan

On 20 June 2014 01:35, Andrea Faulds <ajf@ajf.me> wrote:
> Good evening again,
>
> I=E2=80=99ve been working on a patch to add bigints to PHP for more than =
a fortnight now. It=E2=80=99d based on the phpng branch and very much unfin=
ished, but is somewhat working.
>
> A draft RFC is available here: https://wiki.php.net/rfc/bigint
>
> It=E2=80=99s quite far from done, but I wanted to start some discussion n=
ow as finishing the patch will take some time.
>
> Thanks!
>
> --
> Andrea Faulds
> http://ajf.me/
>
>
>
>
>
> --
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