Adding arbitrary Length Numbers to MathPHP about math

[BenMorel]

Hi!

Thanks for reaching out. First of all congrats for your library, I've never stumbled upon it before, it really handles advanced (for me, at least!) mathematical concepts.

Indeed if you add arbitrary size integer/decimal support, our libraries will overlap somehow on this point, which is not really a problem but may lead to duplicate efforts. brick/math's objective is to only provide the arbitrary size objects (integer/decimal/rational), and nothing more (but do it well).

This is particularly useful for anything related to money.

One of the strengths of brick/math is its ability to use GMP or BCMath functions when available, and to fall back to plain PHP when not (with a performance penalty). It may lack more advanced features, but so far there haven't been requests for these features despite > 1M downloads.

I'm afraid I won't have time to invest into translating what I've done here for another project, however if you want to avoid reinventing the wheel, and think that you can build your arbitrary-sized objects on top of brick/math, then by all means I'll be happy to help, including if this requires changes here (I'm still in 0.x so quite flexible).

[Beakerboy]

I'm not the lead developer, I just submit a lot of code. One of the main points is to be free of dependencies, so no references to GMP, or BCMath in this project. These large numbers can then be used for things like cryptographic functions or matrix algebra. Just thought I'd let you know about the project in case you need some more mathematical objects, or want a place to put some code you've developed.

[BenMorel]

One of the main points is to be free of dependencies, so no references to GMP, or BCMath in this project.

I'm not sure whether this is a good move, TBH. I call them optional dependencies in brick/math's case, as nothing will tell you that you must install them, and the library will work just fine without them. Only the docs will mention them, so that you know how to make the lib faster if you need the speed.

However, the performance gain by taking advantage of these libraries is HUGE (tenfold at least), so it's not to be taken lightly. You can simply not achieve, or even approach, the same level of performance by using plain PHP. PHP is an interpreted language on top of a state machine, so inherently slower, and does not even give you the low-level bricks you'd need to manipulate data in the way GMP does it, or at least, not in an efficient manner.

Anyway, if you feel like it, just benchmark it to get an idea.

Just thought I'd let you know about the project in case you need some more mathematical objects, or want a place to put some code you've developed.

For now I'm good, but thanks for the suggestion! It's always interesting to see what's around anyway.

[Beakerboy]

I fully agree with you, but I’m not the lead dev. I’ve been using GMP to guide the design of my object so that down the road an interface can be used internally instead of the object.

[BenMorel]

That sounds like a wise approach.

In brick/math, this is achieved through the Calculator abstract class. It's not an interface, as it contains helper methods, some of which can be overridden by child classes if they natively implement the function (e.g., gcd()).

Implementations:

• BCMathCalculator
• GmpCalculator
• NativeCalculator (plain PHP)