Re: [Monotone-devel] Re: Speedup chances

[Jack Lloyd]

On Mon, May 05, 2008 at 08:41:09PM +0200, Lapo Luchini wrote:
> Christof Petig wrote:
> >Botan seems to call memset on buffer free. And since we call hex_decode
> >some 100k times per OE roster read, this easily adds up.
> >
> >I don't know whether botan's hex_decode is slow or fast, but using
> >dynamic buffering here kills performance.
> 
> I don't think it's a problem of raw speed, but of different scopes: 
> should every free of a cryptography library memset to zero in order to 
> reduce probability of disclosure of something possibly secret?
> I'd say yes.
> 
> But do monotone revision numbers need to be cleaned that way?
> Most probably not.

Concur. This is something I have been thinking about / working on.
The problem is allowing this level of control without inducing a huge
amount of verbosity both in the library and (more important) in
application code. This seems hard to do in a language without dynamic
scoping.

-Jack