Having spent the last few months pretty much just using Java, my C skills seemed a bit rusty. Nevertheless, two initial implementations now exist for the “exact pattern matching with don’t cares” problem, the naive version and the FFT-based one. FFTW was quite straightforward to use in the end.

I’m now just beginning to get a sense of the scope of this project — there’s so much to do it’s hard to know where I should focus next…I need to add details for these implementations, come up with some way of testing and benchmarking their speeds, investigate the Number Theoretic Transform and make a list of other problems to solve. It’s quite exciting but a little daunting too! Onwards and upwards I guess.