Building the gmp

Build Options for the GMP

There are many different possible configurations when building the gmp. One that is very important to CoCoA is how to allocate memory in the gmp since large numbers can overflow the stack quite easily. For a general overview for the gmp 4.1 have a look at http://www.gnu.org/software/gmp/manual/html_node/Build-Options.html.

So when configuring the gmp make sure that you choose

--enable-alloca=no

in order to use malloc and thereby using the heap instead of the stack. This entails a small (roughly 2% or so) performance penalty but at least your computation finishes instead of segfaulting for mysterious reasons.

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