As a non-crypto person who coincidentally just spent a couple days mucking with this in Go earlier this week, I absolutely agree with the author's assertion tha

As a non-crypto person who coincidentally just spent a couple days mucking with this in Go earlier this week, I absolutely agree with the author's assertion that it's very hard to find complete examples, and even articles that don't assume a decent baseline of domain expertise. fwiw my own thought/research path, after choosing Ed25519, looked something like this: 1. "How do I generate the key pair? I should probably use openssl since I trust that and have used it in the past." After googling, I see I can use `openssl genpkey -algorithm ed25519` for the private key. 2. "OK, that gave me a pem file. How do I deal with that in Go?" From here I found the same blainsmith.com article as OP, which is overall very helpful but unfortunately contains the unnecessary asn1.Unmarshal steps. 3. "Hmm, this looks overly complex." Luckily I took some extra time to look at other search results for "ed25519 pem golang" and found the crypto/x509 functions linked above. In retrospect, if I had just used ed25519.GenerateKey(nil) for step 1, I would have saved a ton of time. But this really wasn't initially clear to me at all. Exactly as the OP said, "Because as I stumbled through the undergrowth figuring this stuff out in the usual way, via Google and StackOverflow, I did not convince myself that the path I was following was the right one." And in this case the OP is a highly respected software engineer with his own wikipedia page, so at least I'm in good company for tripping all over this process :)