Fast and lightweight hash implementations (xdigest)
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I was working on optimising Subversion. One of its bottleneck is computing file hashes. First thing I tried was to use OpenSSL for that. It significantly improved its performance. It made it 8x faster in some cases.However, it was not optimal to use it:- OpenSSL is heavy and bloated. It's like a whole operating system on its own.- Since OpenSSL 3.0, low-level digest APIs are deprecated, and instead they recommend to use EVP which might be slow in some cases.So I decided to create a new library for computing cryptographic digests. It basically takes OpenSSL's implementations, but with an aim to provide simple and lightweight access to popular hash algorithms with a focus on performance.
HN · launched Feb 19, 2026 · 5 upvotes (top 89%) · 0 views
Niche: encryption and cryptography tools · 147 launches, 21 in the last 7 days ▲ +40% · Explore this niche →
Category and tags
- Horizontal
- Dev tools
- Developer
- Not AI
- Hobby / open-source project
Visit website ↗ Source listing ↗
More like this: all 147 launches in encryption and cryptography tools →
Could you build this?
No Writing ultra-fast, lightweight cryptographic/hashing implementations in C/assembly that beat OpenSSL requires expert-level assembly optimization, cache alignment, and SIMD instruction utilization.
What it would actually take: The implementation requires low-level C and handwritten assembly optimized for specific CPU architectures using AVX-512, ARM NEON, or SHA-NI hardware acceleration. The hard part is maximizing throughput per cycle, managing register allocations, cache line pipelining, and ensuring constant-time cryptographic safety where applicable. This requires deep systems performance engineering and processor microarchitecture expertise.
Discussion
No comments on this launch.
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one : 344 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #315 of 345 (itself plus its competitors, highest first, normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 112 days after the earliest competitor.
- polyxor · github · 2026-09-26 · 53 upvotes · similarity 0.48
- Lightweight C++23 S3 client with no extra deps (just curl and OpenSSL) · hn · 2026-06-13 · 5 upvotes · similarity 0.46
- A fast hex dumper, written in Rust · hn · 2026-06-29 · 6 upvotes · similarity 0.46
- advanced-hash-calculator · github · 2026-11-10 · 102 upvotes · similarity 0.45
- I created a RAW to HDRI stacker in (mostly) Common Lisp · hn · 2026-06-05 · 35 upvotes · similarity 0.45
- Grsh · hn · 2026-01-14 · 50 upvotes · similarity 0.44
- utreexo-utreexo · github · 2026-11-06 · 29 upvotes · similarity 0.44
- OmniDiff · hn · 2026-11-01 · 319 upvotes · similarity 0.44
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