[pizlonator]

Is it just a perf issue, or something else?

[jaas]

I assume you're asking why the underlying crypto still needs to be written in asm. There are two primary reasons:

1. Performance

2. Defense against side channel attacks (e.g. constant time operations)

[woodruffw]

And one political reason: the existing implementation is FIPS, and FIPS validation is a gigantic pain in the rear :-)

[pizlonator]

Has anyone in this space considered adding type annotations to assembly?

It’s totally possible and it’s a thing compilers for memory safe languages sometimes have to do internally.

It wouldn’t take a lot of language engineering to make it nice. You’d end up being able to take that asm code more or less as is and annotate it with just a type proof so that Rust/Go/Fil-C can call into that shit without worrying about it blowing up your rules.

[pizlonator]

Ah, thanks, makes sense