[kaffe] GMP and Kaffe

[Alan Eliasen]

   I'd like to thank Dalibor for making a very nice patch for the
problems with the GMP libraries in Kaffe on x86_64.  Kaffe can use the
GMP libraries for BigInteger work, (with the -Xnative-big-math flag at
runtime) and it makes Kaffe quite spectactularly faster when working
with very large integers.

   For example, to calculate the value of a large Mersenne prime,
2^20996011 - 1, and format that in base 10, here are the timings:

        Kaffe:     16.72 seconds
Sun JVM 1.5.0:  18301.30 seconds  (that's just over 5 hours.)

   Nice!  Both of these are on an Athlon 64 "3400+" (real clock speed
2200 MHz).  While the Sun JVM is faster for many things (Kaffe is
interpreted on the x86_64,) this is a real selling point for large
numerical work.

   Thanks to all who made this possible!

-- 
  Alan Eliasen                 |  "It's amazing how much mature wisdom
  eliasen at mindspring.com       |   resembles being too tired."
  http://futureboy.homeip.net/ |     -- Robert Heinlein