Belgian programmer solves MIT’s 20-year-old time capsule cryptographic puzzle

Re:Belgian programmer solves MIT’s 20-year-old time capsule ... by rich-tea on Tuesday April 30, 2019 @03:20AM (#19785789)

Just want to add that GMP is not "C". The critical parts are written in assembly. It's not really possible to do fast multiple-precision arithmetic in C. You need direct access to add with carry instructions and the like.

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Re:Belgian programmer solves MIT’s 20-year-old time capsule ... by GordonS on Tuesday April 30, 2019 @03:30AM (#19785833)

Yes, access to hardware intrinsics is what can really accelerate arithmetic - C makes this pretty easy though.

As an aside, .NET Core 3.0 will deliver access to intrinsics - not sure if Java or any other managed platform already has this?

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Re:Belgian programmer solves MIT’s 20-year-old time capsule ... by TacticalCoder on Thursday May 02, 2019 @08:07AM (#19806949)

Your nick sounds familiar. "richtea" I'd say I remember but no idea from where.

Yeah I'm sorry that my comment from late 2014 gave that false impression that I said GMP was written in C. What I meant was that it was, when I did the testing, slightly faster to call GMP from C than from Haskell, Clojure, Java. I remember I tried all these back then and calling GMP for C was a bit more efficient. Now I know there are now ways to call libs like this from Java without paying the old foreign function call penalty: but I didn't know about that in 2014. So I called GMP from C because it was faster. Out of memory I'd have said GMP was C with inline assembly but I may be wrong ; )

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Re:Belgian programmer solves MIT’s 20-year-old time capsule ... by rich-tea on Thursday May 02, 2019 @01:55PM (#19810561)

Most of it is just straight up assembly. I don't think there's much inline assembly because that's hard to maintain for multiple platforms.

Rich Tea is a British biscuit. Maybe that's why you remember it?

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