Add better build documentation #622

1. 
   gmaxwell commented at 12:45 AM on May 23, 2019: contributor

   The library is designed to be easy to use without the build system, e.g. you can build the tests with nothing more than:

   $ gcc -o tests src/tests.c -I. -Iinclude/ -DUSE_NUM_NONE -DUSE_FIELD_INV_BUILTIN -DUSE_SCALAR_INV_BUILTIN -DUSE_FIELD_10X26 -DUSE_SCALAR_8X32 -DVERIFY
   

   We should document this fact better, because for many embedded systems the whole build system is overkill. See also #184

   Related, we should also provide packaging instructions for common OSes, see #545

2. 
   real-or-random commented at 8:35 AM on May 23, 2019: contributor

   I'm not sure if we want this but this could be made even easier with just -DUSE_BASIC_CONFIG if we include basic-config.h at the appropriate places. It's only used for gen-context at the moment.

3. 
   gmaxwell commented at 9:46 AM on May 23, 2019: contributor

   We could also do some ifdef decision to use 32 vs 64 bit fields by default.

4. gmaxwell added this to the milestone initial release on May 23, 2019
5. 
   real-or-random commented at 8:19 AM on May 29, 2019: contributor

   We currently rely on ./configure to define WORDS_BIGENDIAN, which could lead to very annoying failures.

6. 
   gmaxwell commented at 7:42 PM on June 3, 2019: contributor

   Maybe we should have a #warn on use of 32bit field/scalar when sizeof(void*)==8, I've found some cases of people publishing benchmarks that appear to have used 32bit libsecp256k1 (while comparing to avx2 code in another library...)

7. 
   real-or-random commented at 3:41 PM on April 6, 2020: contributor

   #621 (comment)

8. 
   jonasnick commented at 1:05 PM on May 9, 2026: contributor

   I believe this is superseded by #929.

9. jonasnick closed this on May 9, 2026

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Contributors

gmaxwellreal-or-randomjonasnick

Milestone
stable release (1.0.0-rc.1)