About

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_decimal.c is a wrapper for the libmpdec library. libmpdec is a fast C

library for correctly-rounded arbitrary precision decimal floating point

arithmetic. It is a complete implementation of Mike Cowlishaw/IBM's

General Decimal Arithmetic Specification.

Build process for the module

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As usual, the build process for _decimal.so is driven by setup.py in the top

level directory. setup.py autodetects the following build configurations:

1) x64 - 64-bit Python, x86_64 processor (AMD, Intel)

2) uint128 - 64-bit Python, compiler provides __uint128_t (gcc)

3) ansi64 - 64-bit Python, ANSI C

4) ppro - 32-bit Python, x86 CPU, PentiumPro or later

5) ansi32 - 32-bit Python, ANSI C

6) ansi-legacy - 32-bit Python, compiler without uint64_t

7) universal - Mac OS only (multi-arch)

It is possible to override autodetection by exporting:

PYTHON_DECIMAL_WITH_MACHINE=value, where value is one of the above options.

NOTE

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decimal.so is not built from a static libmpdec.a since doing so led to

failures on AIX (user report) and Windows (mixing static and dynamic CRTs

causes locale problems and more).