soundart / perl6-tweetnacl Goto Github PK

Hi, I saw the note in the README requesting some feedback. I had some golang code that used these primitives to do SecretBox encryption/decryption so I wrote a bit of P6 code to see how it compared.

I was able to interoperate with the golang code fairly easily so it is great to know that it is compatible with other implementations.

Having written some P6 nativecall-based code in the past, here's some design suggestions based on that. My general philosophy is that I want to use nativecall-based modules to hide the details of C behind things that make more sense from P6. The same thought applies to ctypes in Python or XS in Perl 5 or any other bindings around C language libraries.

To this point, modules should avoid exporting the C functions. So in SecretKey.pm6, you would avoid marking crypto_secretbox_open_int as is export. If you do think that consumers of your modules may want to import and use these directly, consider putting them all in a Raw.pm file, similar to how GTK::Simple does it.

Along these lines, avoid requiring CArray and other NativeCall types as input parameters. I've found that functions taking CArray can be represented by the Blob type, since Blob also permits Buf and utf8, both are fairly common. You can take advantage of some other modules to help here, see the modules in the NativeHelpers:: namespace: http://modules.perl6.org/search/?q=nativehelpers

You may also consider using subtypes of Blob: subset KeyData of Blob where *.elems == 32. Then you can use this as a type parameter.

I would also suggest unifiying the return types of the two encrypt multi methods, since it seems weird to have them return different types depending on if you provide a nonce or not. If you do want different return types, I suggest document this.

Aside from this, I found the code reliable so far, so that's excellent. Thanks for putting this out here so other people can use it, I really appreciate it.

Not sure if you are still actively interested in Perl 6 and/or this code, but thought I would pass along the feedback in hopes that it helps. Let me know if you want any more information or examples and I'll see what I can do.