Characteristics (1/3)
Internally written in C (thus fast)
Relies on CPU's machine word operations for maximum speed
Auto-adapts to size of machine word at runtime
Uses efficient algorithms (mostly "divide-and-conquer"), time
complexity of many functions O(1), O(n), O(n ld n)
C library at the core can also be used stand-alone (without Perl)
Free Software (GPL+Artistic), C library also LGPL