How do you write a bigint library / how does libgmp work?

Question

I'm aware of a number of BigInt libraries for C on various platforms and how to use them but I'm intrigued: how do they work? How would I go about building my own library (I'm not going to try, no point re-inventing the wheel but I'm interested in how it might happen)? Can anyone point me towards tutorials etc that might explain the procedure / the basics?

Thanks,

Ninefingers.

Answer 1

I found that this wasn't a bad overview. However, if you want something more in depth (and almost guaranteed to be 100% correct), you probably want to read the relevant parts of The Art of Computer Programming, Volume 2.