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`).
Each backend can now be selected by an individual feature:
- `u32_backend` for `backend::u32`;
- `u64_backend` for `backend::u64`;
- `avx2_backend` for `backend::avx2`;
The `u64_backend` is selected by default, since most people use X64 and we have
no way to select based on target (see discussion in #126). However, these
changes mean that it is possible to select the backend explicitly, and if we
had the ability to select target-default features, we could do so easily.
Change Scalar::non_adjacent_form() to take a width parameter.
This rewrite also makes it faster, although it's probably a ways off
from optimal. I don't know how much it matters.
TODO: write up description of why this computes the same thing.
Thanks to @oleganza for pointing out an error reading bits across words
in an earlier version of this code.
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.
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.
