Copyright (C) 2009-2013 Luca De Feo and Eric Schost.

FAAST is an open-source C++ library providing strongly object-oriented data structures and high-performance algorithms for elements and polynomials in Artin-Schreier towers over finite fields.

The latest stable version of FAAST is available at https://github.com/defeo/FAAST/archive/latest.zip.

You can grab the latest sources from the GitHub repo at https://github.com/defeo/FAAST.

The API documentation is available at http://defeo.github.io/FAAST, or can be downloaded from https://github.com/defeo/FAAST/archive/gh-pages.zip.

FAAST is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

FAAST is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with FAAST; see the file COPYING. If not, write to the Free Software Foundation, Inc., 51 Franklin Street, Fifth Floor, Boston, MA 02110-1301, USA.

FAAST is built on top of Victor Shoup's NTL, you can download it at http://www.shoup.net/NTL/. Only NTL 5.x is supported, work to port the library to NTL 6 is ongoing.

There's a few libraries that affect how NTL works. GMP is a multiprecision arithmetic library that can be used by NTL to represent large integers. Even though it is not expected to affect the overall performances of FAAST, compiling NTL with GMP is still the recommended method. GMP can be downloaded at http://gmplib.org/.

gf2x is a library for multiplying polynomials over the binary field. If you work on characteristic 2 fields and you are interested in performance, then we recommend that you install gf2x and compile NTL with support for it. gf2x can be downloaded at http://gforge.inria.fr/projects/gf2x/.

Instructions on how to compile NTL with support for GMP and/or gf2x can be found at http://www.shoup.net/ntl/doc/tour.html.

To compile FAAST, simply type

unzip FAAST-xxx.zip
cd FAAST-xxx/
./configure
make
make check

During the configure script FAAST checks for the presence of NTL, GMP and gf2x; checks for GMP and gf2x are optional and can be disabled through --disable-ntl-static. If NTL has been built as a shared library, passing --disable-ntl-static might speed up the compilation.

Notice that you might have to specify the paths to NTL, GMP or gf2x if they are installed in some exotic directory; see configure --help.

To install FAAST, from the compilation directory type

su
make install

The library will be installed to a default location, you can change this by giving a different --prefix to the configure script.

The latest API docs are available online at http://defeo.github.io/FAAST, or can be downloaded from https://github.com/defeo/FAAST/archive/gh-pages.zip.

If you wish, you can generate from your source pacakge. You must have installed the doxygen documentation system for this. You can download doxygen at http://www.doxygen.org/. You will also need LaTeX and Xy-pic to generate some formulae, graphs and two logos.

Once doxygen is installed, you can generate the documentation by typing

make doc

This creates a directory doc/html containing the documentation. You can edit the file doxy.conf to enable more options and output formats, refer to the doxygen manual.

If you are interested in understanding the internals of FAAST, you can generate a more detailed documentation by typing

make doc-dev

This creates a directory doc-dev/html containing the documentation.