This change provides a common convention for using allocator-dependent
features with:
#![cfg(feature = "alloc")]
When available, `Vec` is imported consistently as `prelude::Vec`, which
means modules that need access to `Vec` can simply do:
use prelude::*;
and if an allocator is available, `Vec` will be in the crate prelude.
This allows all `alloc` vs `std` gating to be handled in `lib.rs`,
`build.rs`, and `prelude.rs` so the rest of the codebase doesn't have to
do any gating whatsoever.
Unfortunately, Rust selects `i32` as the type for an integer literal
when the literal has no other type constraints. This means that someone
cannot write `Scalar::from(1)`, as Rust will choose `i32` as the type for
`1`, and we don't `impl From<i32> for Scalar`.
We could implement `From` conversions for signed integers, but since
`Scalar` operations should be constant-time by default, this would
require us to extract the sign bit of the integer and use it to
conditionally select between the positive and negative of Scalar
constructed from the value bits. This is more expensive than the
unsigned operation, and I don't think it's what anyone really wants.
Making API consumers specify that their literals are unsigned is
slightly annoying, but better than the above alternative.
It would also be nice to change `Scalar::from_hash` to be
`impl<D: Digest<OutputSize = U64>> From<D> for Scalar`,
but this isn't currently allowed by Rust (since that `impl` "could"
conflict with the `impl From<u8>` if someone decided that `u8` should
`impl Digest`).
This changes the primary function for the `VartimeMultiscalarMul` trait
to an `optional_multiscalar_mul` trait that accepts
`Option<Self::Point>` (and returns `None` if any input points are
`None`).
The existing `vartime_multiscalar_mul` is changed to be a wrapper around
this function to avoid code duplication. This may result in an
extra copy of each input point, but that cost is probably not
significant compared to the cost of the multiscalar multiplication.
The motivation is to allow performing multiscalar multiplications with
inline decompression. Currently, API consumers have to allocate
temporary buffers for all of their points, decompress into those
buffers, then pass (iterators over) those buffers into the multiscalar
multiplication code, which then creates new buffers for lookup tables.
These traits have the same interface, but with different names, so that it's
not possible to use them interchangeably. (Constant-time and variable-time
routines should not be used interchangeably).
This commit changes the external API to use these traits, replacing
```
edwards::multiscalar_mul
edwards::vartime::multiscalar_mul
```
with
```
EdwardsPoint::multiscalar_mul (as an impl)
EdwardsPoint::vartime_multiscalar_mul (as an impl)
```
and similarly for Ristretto.
Refactoring the backend is for a later commit.
Multiscalar multiplication with precomputation is for a later commit.
The `edwards::vartime` module is retained since it's used for
`vartime_double_base_scalar_mul`.
It should be subsumed into the precomputation API in a later commit.
Since Criterion can only benchmark public API, these changes just drop
all internal benchmarks (e.g., benchmarks for field operations). But
those are usually microbenchmarks whose meaning is kind of questionable
anyways, so I don't think this is a big loss.
The `bench` feature disappears, since Criterion works on stable Rust.
As noted in the Decaf paper, mapping twice and adding the results ensures a
uniform distribution over the group. This changes our random point and
hash-to-point functions to do this, matching the Sage script.
This allows iterators returning either &Scalars or Scalars, so that it's
possible to use map() and friends to adjust scalars as they're being fed into
the multiscalar multiplication.
