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! :)