[noise] Python scripts for manipulating patterns

[Trevor Perrin]

On Mon, Oct 31, 2016 at 2:43 AM, Naveen Nathan <naveen at lastninja.net> wrote:
>>      Code-gen would be particularly useful, Noise adopters so far are
>>      preferring simple "compiled" -code rather than general libraries.
>>
>>      I feel like you could get pretty far just with per-language files
>>      containing some text templates, but I'm sure devil's in details...
>>
>>    I did think about that.A  One "devil" is the back end crypto primitives -
>>    the API's for those are all over the map with no consistency.A  But if
>>    that can be pushed off to a plug-in class/template, then it may be doable.
[...]
> There is however consistency in the Noise spec on how the crypto primitives
> are accessed, and if autogenerated code assumes this interface, I think
> that is sufficient. The most difficult part in implementing Noise (imo)
> is collecting (or implementing) the primitives. The rest is fairly automatic
> and code autogeneration makes a lot of sense.


Yeah, I wouldn't expect a code-gen tool to know about every
crypto-library and language, as long as you could configure it by
writing template strings that would be a big help.

Here's a use case:

When talking about Noise with users / potential users, I make the
point that it's simple.  But people look at the 37-page spec and
interpreter-style implementations and are skeptical.

So I end up hand-writing the specific pseudocode or code, at which
point people get it and want to just implement that.  So having an
easy way to get to this code, without hand-crafting, would be very
handy...

(Btw, we got a nice mention in DJB's crypto blog
https://blog.cr.yp.to/20161030-pqnist.html
)

Trevor