Libsodium at 13: Reflecting on the Cryptography Library's Design Philosophy and API Stability
By
raggi
Slow-proofed and worth the wait. Worth its weight in flour.
Summary
The article discusses libsodium, a 13-year-old cryptography library, focusing on its design philosophy of making cryptography simple and accessible to developers rather than cryptographers. It emphasizes the library's commitment to stable APIs, high-level abstractions that hide implementation details, and the author's obsession with never breaking APIs. The piece reflects on the project's origins, goals, and design principles over its 13-year history.
Key quotes
· 4 pulledLibsodium's goal was to expose APIs to perform operations, not low-level functions.
Users shouldn't even have to know or care about what algorithms are used internally.
Never breaking the APIs is also something I'm obsessed with.
I started that project to pursue Dan Bernstein's desire to make cryptography simple to use.
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