That's a fair point, to some extent. If you're specifically looking to perform symmetric encryption on a string with a string-encoded password, then yes, SJCL i

That's a fair point, to some extent. If you're specifically looking to perform symmetric encryption on a string with a string-encoded password, then yes, SJCL is easier to use. The documentation is centered around that one simple example, and the library doesn't seem to do a lot else (at least through a high-level API). I also have a problem with NaCl/Sodium forcing users to handle nonces, rather than handling that detail internally by default. Besides that, Sodium isn't particularly more difficult to use than SJCL; the whole point is that it's an easy-to-use high-level interface that's hard to misuse. I would also note that SJCL's defaults are a bit dated (CCM vs GCM, 128-bit vs 256-bit, PBKDF2 vs a memory-hard KDF like scrypt or Argon2). Additionally, being pure JS would raise concerns about side channel attacks more so than WebAssembly (like libsodium.js) or native code (like WebCrypto). I'm sure there are simple use cases where SJCL provides some value, and I'm not saying data and applications that depend on it out in the wild should necessarily be considered already compromised, but I'd struggle to think of a situation where I would consider using it in a new project today, over either libsodium or nothing at all / just TLS.