Re: Proposal: Addition of a random number generator to GLib

[Josh MacDonald <jmacd CS Berkeley EDU>]

Quoting Jeff Garzik (jgarzik@pobox.com):
> On Sat, 20 Mar 1999, Josh MacDonald wrote:
> > Quoting Jeff Garzik (jgarzik@pobox.com):
> > > Otherwise looks good.  This will nicely complement the checksum module I
> > > would like to add to Glib, for security work and authentication
> > > especially.
> 
> > If people are interested I can add SHA-1 and MD5 into glib right away.
> 
> I am interested in developing a checksum API, much like the random
> number API being proposed.  The user can pick SHA, MD5, polynomial
> hash, or a user-provided routine.  And there are functions that require
> a GChecksum structure to maintain state, and other functions that
> directly create/update the checksum w/o requiring state variables.
> Attached is the MD5 impl I was looking into, which benchmarks faster
> than the reference code.

Second reply.  I'm concerned that glib is creeping out of focus.  I am
currently using openssl for all my random number generation, checksum,
and encryption needs.  I also use checksums in a lot of places, and 
I don't want everything I use to depend on openssl.  Adding a few checksums
into glib would allow me to remove the code from Xdelta and PRCS2, but
your proposal duplicates a lot of effort that people have put into these
interfaces in other packages.  What does everyone else think?

-josh