By default, bignum uses a backend module written in pure Perl to do the math, but you can instruct it to use a different implementation, for instance the fast GMP library (see this):

On my computer: 

$ time echo '2^500000-1'|bc >/dev/null 
real    0m3.057s
user    0m2.920s
sys     0m0.010s

$ time perl -e 'use bigint only => 'GMP'; my $x = 2 ** 500000 - 1; pri
+nt $x' >/dev/null 
real    0m0.201s
user    0m0.160s
sys     0m0.010s

[download]
In that case, the perl version is ~15 times faster!!!

In reply to Re^2: bignum rocks 2^43_112_609-1 by salva
in thread bignum rocks 2^43_112_609-1 by jettero

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