3 ms·

They might be the bottleneck in things where the load is crypto heavy sure. I was more talking about a case where a developer would like to add crypto to their

• zrm 8y ago
  That's always the trouble. Nothing is optimal for everything but you don't want a different API for every possible combination. Particularly in a case like this, you would end up with two APIs, one that takes an immutable state plus a nonce and the other that takes a mutable state that is really the immutable state plus the nonce which it increments for you, with the separate question of whether it handles the locking for you or not (note that not all platforms even have threads). They're so similar that having both is confusing, but if you're to have only one then the applications that need good performance (which are common) want the one where the caller supplies the nonce, as does anything else that may need visibility into that, e.g. if messages are sent from more than one process or device. Moreover, the performance implications creep up on you. You don't expect it to matter for your chat app until you start letting users attach files to messages and suddenly you're encrypting 10GB files instead of 10 byte messages. Then you start losing users to apps that use faster encryption, or worse, no encryption.