Re: Big Numbers in Poke

[Jose E. Marchesi]

> Hello Hrishit.
>
>> I saw the GNU poke ideas page was looking at extending support for
>> arbitrary-bit arithmetic, and wanted to know how I can contribute. I'm
>> currently a final-year undergraduate based out of Bangalore, India, and
>> will be interning with Qualcomm's compilers team until June.
>>
>> I have experience with the LLVM infrastructure, and am quite competent at
>> systems-level programming. I have core competencies in C and C++, and I'd
>> love the opportunity to play around with the inner workings of poke!
>>
>> Please let me know if there are any opportunities (GSoC or otherwise), and
>> perhaps we can discuss how to proceed with this project.
>
> First of all, thank you very much for your interest.  My name is José
> and I would be mentoring you during this project.
>
> For context, this is the project/idea you are referring to:
>
>   Idea: support for big numbers in poke
>   =====================================
>
>   Right now poke supports integer values of any number of bits, from 1
>   to 64.  We wish to extend this to cover integers with an arbitrarily
>   large number of bits.
>
>   This is a broad project requiring work on many areas of the program:
>
>   - Integration with the GNU gmp library.
>   - Changes in the Poke language.
>     + Compiler work.
>     + Poke Virtual Machine work:
>       - New boxed values for big numbers.
>       - New set of instructions operating on big numbers.
>     + Adapt the IO subsystem to handle integers bigger than 64 bits.
>     + Tests and documentation.
>
> The first step would be for you to bootstrap and build the git version
> of poke.  You can find the git repository at https://jemarch.net/poke.
>
> Then, the project is going to require an initial brainstorming phase.
> We have a pretty clear idea of what is needed for this project and what
> is the end result we want, but there are many design variables that have
> to be settled and decided before starting the implementation.
>
> Welcome! :)

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