I read the article is does not mention speed, performance once, in which it had nothing to do with what I stated. I was simply stating that higher level languages will cause the library to be slower also less easy to be used by other high level languages like python.
I do not understand why people keep pushing unsafe code when computers keep getting faster and we have more and more headroom (cpu, memory, bandwidth). There is no excuse to keep running unprovable crypto.
Maybe because most of the code currently out there being use by the biggest companies in the world still use these "unsafe" languages. & tons of the job market still is in these "unsafe" languages.
I think you should read the article again. The language in question isn't higher level really it just has compile time type checking, which has no overhead.
That's still not my point. At the time of starting openssl I don't believe that ATS was around. In any case my point is that back then C lang was the best choice for performance and still is revered as the "fastest" as `nearly` all other languages are written on top of it either directly or indirectly. In any case I would love to see someone tell all of the openssl community to just drop C and switch to a different language.
C being loved in the UNIX community is one of the primary reasons that these libraries are in C.
Ada has been around since the beginning of the eighties, has and had performance that is near that of C, does not use a garbage collector, provides C linkage, and is far more safe than C.
If you do allow garbage collection, there were many performant and safe alternatives in the 90ies, such as ML.
'Higher level' doesn't necessarily say anything. Rust and ATS are both higher level than C, but they can both do everything that C does.
Is Ada less performant than C? I know it has bounds checking, but that can be turned off for "shipped" software. Does it have some features that incur a runtime cost and that can't be disabled?