[coyotos-dev] About BigNum

[Jonathan S. Shapiro]

I should perhaps stop to explain why we are not using libgmp or
libimath.

BigNum.[ch]xx is used in several packages, including the BitC runtime.
For a variety of reasons, we decided to license the BitC runtime under
the BSD copyright. This ruled out libgmp.

libimath was feasible, but getting its memory allocation mechanisms to
align properly with the BitC runtime would have required extra levels of
indirection, and it wasn't very C++ friendly (it is otherwise
*excellent*).

This motivated a desire for a BSD-licensed bignum package, which led me
to implement BigNum.[ch]xx.

shap