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Experience With Nickle

The various incarnations of Nickle have been used for a range of tasks. First and foremost, Nickle is the calculator program of choice: it is an altogether superior5replacement for UNIX bc, dc, expr, and the like.

Nickle is also a very nice general purpose programming language, especially for numerical work. Nickle programming projects distributed with the reference implementation include

In addition, numerous other projects have been assisted by Nickle, including

As noted above, the performance of Nickle is not spectacular, but is adequate for the tasks for which it is intended. For example, the Miller-Rabin implementation typically spends 5-15 seconds generating a 512-bit probabilistic prime on a 700MHz Athlon with adequate memory. This is about a factor of 5 slower than the C-based probabilistic prime generator of OpenSSH. As another example, the Nickle implementation of the Weber GCD code mentioned above is typically 10 times slower on a given input than the C implementation. On the other hand, the Nickle implementation was much easier to develop.

The end result of this experience has been that Nickle has become part of the authors' standard toolkit. It has reached its design goals: the current version is simple to use, extend, and modify.


next up previous
Next: Related Work Up: Nickle: Language Principles and Previous: The Nickle Implementation
Bart Massey 2001-04-19