Hi Simon,

I appreciate I'm coming very late to this discussion, but I want to make a point and suggestion.

Well, I don't think we had reached a clear consensus yet, so it's not too late to explore more options!

These are very similar points to those Manuel was making to remove the feature in the first place - however - short of investing the time in rewriting the asymmetric functions, what we could do as a quick fix is to replace the existing memory code with a block allocation scheme - which should be much faster, speed up the asymmetric functions (in theory), avoid fragmentation, be more deterministic, and a better fit for embedded applications. That could then become the basis of the library for other projects too.

I think compared to our existing allocator, that would indeed be an improvement, and as you say possibly a "quick fix" for some of the performance issues of our asymmetric crypto (esp. ECC)... for people who use our allocator. I'm still under the impression they're a minority of users, even in the embedded world.

I think it comes back to a point we touched on earlier in the thread: what other allocators are available, and how do they compare to the design you have in mind? If existing allocators in popular embedded libc implementations already handle small allocations efficiently, then people are probably better off using them.

I wouldn't mind contributing such a feature, as I had to write something very similar last week anyway.

If I do it - will you accept it?

Thanks for the offer! Unfortunately I think it's hard to give you a clear yes or no answer at this point.

Speaking only for myself (others in the team may disagree and are welcome to say so in reply), I'm a bit concerned that for a "quick fix" it would represent a significant review effort: there are obvious security implications, it would be a complete re-design of a whole module, and I'm not sure how many of the potential reviewers are very familiar with allocators (I know I'm not). Considering we already have a number of significant contributions that we just can't review as soon as we'd like, I'd be concerned adding another one.

Adding to that concern is the fact that at this point it's still not clear to me if in the long-term we want to keep maintaining this, or use some existing allocator, or move it to a separate project possibly maintained by another team.

Would your offer still stand in a couple of months, when the future of the module is perhaps a bit clearer, and when we've hopefully cleared a few of the long-standing large PR awaiting review?

Thanks, Manuel.