Fast and lightweight hash implementations (xdigest)
Details
- External ID
- 47076537
- Source
- HN
- Company
- —
- Product
- Fast and lightweight hash implementations (xdigest)
- Website domain
- github.com
- Launched
- Feb. 19, 2026
- Cohort
- —
- Upvotes
- 5
- Upvotes percentile
- 0.10512129380053908
- Tags
- —
- Fetched at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:25 p.m.
- Updated at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:25 p.m.
Description
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.
Enrichment
- Theme
- low-level systems and developer tools
- Vertical
- Horizontal
- Function
- Dev tools
- Audience
- Developer
- AI stance
- Not AI
- Project type
- Hobby / open-source project
- Normalized one-liner
- lightweight hash implementations
- Manually corrected
- False
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 — 132 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #122 of 133 (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 0.47
- Lightweight C++23 S3 client with no extra deps (just curl and OpenSSL) · hn · 2026-06-13 · 5 upvotes · similarity 0.45
- A fast hex dumper, written in Rust · hn · 2026-06-29 · 6 upvotes · similarity 0.45
- I created a RAW to HDRI stacker in (mostly) Common Lisp · hn · 2026-06-05 · 35 upvotes · similarity 0.43
- Grsh · hn · 2026-01-14 · 50 upvotes · similarity 0.43
- Optimizing LiteLLM with Rust · hn · 2025-11-18 · 27 upvotes · similarity 0.42
- Glyd · github · 2026-09-19 · 164 upvotes · similarity 0.42
- Bucket · hn · 2026-01-25 · 9 upvotes · similarity 0.42
Other launches for this product
- No other launches for this product.
Same idea, different domain
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