This change required some work, because the to-be-stabilized SIMD functions
don't allow non-constant `imm8`s. Previously, the `stdsimd` functions had a
constifying macro that ensured that the immediates were known. The dalek code
used this to build helper functions which would be inlined into different
places where the immediates were known. Unfortunately, since constexprs aren't
fully supported in Rust yet, this is done by a hidden compiler attribute, and
there's no way to propagate "constness".
To deal with this, some of the functions are specialized (e.g.,
`square_and_negate_D` instead of taking a mask), and others use an enum.
This should contain generic implementations of scalar multiplication algorithms
that can be used with multiple backends. The goal is to move the existing
scalar multiplication code into this submodule, then call it from the
user-facing API. This can also contain code for things we can't do now, like
multiscalar multiplication with precomputation.
The public-facing types with arithmetic operations are:
- `Scalar`s
- `ExtendedPoint`s
- `RistrettoPoint`s
For these types we define operators with all combinations of borrowed and
non-borrowed inputs, to avoid forcing API consumers to write extra ampersands.
Since all of the operations involved with these types are expensive relative to
the cost of an unnecessary copy, this isn't a big deal.
The `MontgomeryPoint` struct isn't included in the above because it's only
useful for scalar multiplication.
This commit is based on work by @UnlawfulMonad.
Originally this was for hygiene, so that we could erase points from
heap-allocated memory in multiscalar_mult, but it ends up providing a cleaner
API for scalar multiplication.
It's kept inside curve_models for now, but it could go somewhere else if that's a better place.
