News Archive 3

I fixed a bug with pbc_param_set_str(). The pbc/pbc program works again.

I added a DLL to the Windows binary release. Hopefully it works with compilers besides MinGW. I would have added a GMP DLL as well but I was unable to build one.

Paul Miller reported bugs in my brand new pairing initialization functions. They should be fixed now.

The largest changes involve pairing initialization and pairing parameters.

For pairing initialization, supply a buffer containing pairing parameters instead of a FILE * stream. For example, rather than:

write something like:

For file reads, personally I like to use mmap() which suits pairing_init_set_buf().

The pbc_param_t data type for pairing parameters replaces a_param_t, …, g_param_t. Having the same data type for all pairing parameter types simplifies the library, though some functions had to be changed slightly.

At last, one can initialize a pairing_t from a pbc_param_t:

Minor differences:

I trimmed the API. The file stream operations are gone. I removed the fetch_ops_t and tracker_t types: the standard C library already provides routines for reading from disk to memory.

I refactored to avoid exposing symtab_t and darray_t, and undocumented routines such as poly_alloc(). I mostly preserved the headers that define these functions, but they are no longer included by pbc.h.

I replaced the CMake files with simple.make, which I use during development, though I test the autotools build before release.

To reduce symbol pollution, all official functions and variables of the PBC now start with pbc_, field_, element_ or pairing_. Other names mostly have hidden visibility in a shared library. Watch out for renamed functions.

I added a convenience wrapper element_pp_pow_zn(), and cleaned up a few source files.

Stefan Weber fixed a bug in Yulian Kalev’s random number generator code for Windows.