[infogulch]

Congrats!

I tried Julia for the first time last week and it was great.

I've been playing with the idea of defining a hash function for lists that can be composed with other hashes to find the hash of the concatenation of the lists. I tried to do this with matrix multiplication of the hash of each list item, but with integer mod 256 elements random matrices are very likely to be singular and after enough multiplications degenerates to the zero matrix. However, with finite field (aka Galois fields) elements, such a matrix is much more likely to be invertible and therefore not degenerate. But I don't really know anything about finite fields, so how should I approach it? Here's where Julia comes in: with some help I was able to combine two libraries, LinearAlgebraX.jl which has functions for matrices with exact elements, with GaloisFields.jl which implements many types of GF, and wrote up a working demo implementation of this "list hash" idea in a Pluto.jl [2] notebook and published it [0] (and a question on SO [1]) after a few days without having any Julia experience at all. Julia seems pretty approachable, has great libraries, and is very powerful (I was even able to do a simple multithreaded implementation in 5 lines).

[0]: https://blog.infogulch.com/2021/07/15/Merklist-GF.html

[1]: https://crypto.stackexchange.com/questions/92139/using-rando...

[2]: https://github.com/fonsp/Pluto.jl