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by davidsarah 3353 days ago
To correct a minor point, none of the current Zcash code comes from the Zerocash academic prototype. All of the code that had come from the prototype was rewritten before launch (mainly in https://github.com/zcash/zcash/pull/625 ).

Much of the performance issue comes from a single design decision made in Zerocash: to use SHA-256 for the Merkle tree, PRF, and note commitment hashes. We'll be changing this for the Sapling update.

-- Daira Hopwood (Zcash developer)
1 comments
indolering 3353 days ago
My apologies, I had assumed the codebase was legacy due to some lamentations about not being able to use Rust.

I hope my portrayal of the performance issues was appropriate.

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daira 3352 days ago
The legacy codebase issue we are lamenting there is just that the code inherited from Bitcoin is in C++. It's of course possible to interface between C++ and Rust, and that's what we're intending to do in future. It would have been risky to try to do that in the code we wrote before launch.

Yes, your portrayal of the performance issues was fine.

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