1. Is there a way in Ruby to speed up 32bit integer arithmetics (only 
involving numbers & sums up to 2^32-1)? I want to use Ruby for 
summarizing network traffic logs, but it's pathetically slow compared to 
Perl:

$ time ruby -e'1000000.times{1073741823+1073741824}'

real    0m23.693s
user    0m5.720s
sys     0m0.610s
$ time perl -e'for(1..1000000){1073741823+1073741824}'

real    0m1.142s
user    0m0.320s
sys     0m0.050s

since 2**30 is already in the Bignum range.

2. Doing arbitrary integer math is already very convenient in Ruby 
because of its automatic conversion. But Ruby still doesn't do seamless 
conversion to arbitrary floating point numbers:

$ irb
irb(main):001:0> 0.00000000000000001
=> 1.0e-17
irb(main):002:0> 0.000000000000000001
=> 0.0

Any chance Ruby will do this in the future? Or perhaps in the nearer 
future, include an arbitrary floating number package in its distribution 
(is there any? GMP is GPL so it potentially a problem license-wise).

-- 
dave