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by nerdponx 3075 days ago
They explicitly address the "Why C++?" question here: https://neopg.io/blog/cplusplus/

Choice quote:

There are many programming languages, and I believe in picking the right tool for the job. In the case of NeoPG, the priorities were:

- Support for strong cryptography.

- Compatibility with C application developers.

- Convert legacy code quickly.

- Tool support for QA.

Everything else is, at this point, a secondary concern. The Sequoia Project uses Rust, and I envy that. But the first thing they had to do was to wrap an existing C crypto library (they choose libnettle), because there is no high quality crypto library for Rust yet. That is their challenge.

My challenge will be to stay focussed on the parts of C++ that are actually helpful, and not get bogged down by the rest.
2 comments
nickpsecurity 3074 days ago
Is using a C library or crypto library that hard in Rust? That's first Ive heard of it being a problem. In high-assurance, it was standard to limit unsafety to the stuff behind interfaces of unsafe modules (incl FFI) in otherwise memory-safe, systems language. We didn't see this as a detriment esp if was C with its wide support.
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vvanders 3074 days ago
> wrap an existing C crypto library

I know it's mostly semantics but calling C from C++ still requires some wrapping(extern "C", integrating build system, etc).

I've found with bindgen unless there's some crazy macro shenanigans going on it's actually quicker for me to integrate C libraries into Rust then wrangling CMake/Make/etc. The C FFI is very much a first-class citizen in Rust.

Even doubly so if we're talking about a cross-platform library.

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lambdafu 3074 days ago
NeoPG uses Botan, which is a crypto library written in C++. I recommend reading its source code and comparing it with, for example, libgcrypt.
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adultSwim 3068 days ago
Is most of the removed code functionality that is now in the crypto library used, Botan?

A blog post on the decision to use an external library might be good. Is there a reason to think that the library will be better maintained than code with similar functionality in GPG?

Great work by the way! Thank you!

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