Using AsRef<[u8]> in Arguments

[gsquire]

This may have been a conscious choice to avoid but I wanted to see if it makes sense to use some type that implements AsRef<[u8]> in place of &[u8]? This would make it easy for users to supply &str or String in addition to &[u8] when calling functions. I thought this would be in line with the idea that mundane is intended to be easy to use.

[jswrenn]

I think you mean AsRef<[u8]>. This is a good idea. It would also make passing in [u8] just a tiny bit more ergonomic.

[gsquire]

@jswrenn You're right. I forgot the slice notation in my comment :)

Updated.

[pop]

Has anybody started working on this? I'm interested in contributing to this project and the experience-easy got my attention. Any guidance or pointers on how/where to get started would be awesome.

[gsquire]

Hey @pop, I started on it here but if you are looking to contribute, feel free to take it over. I am by no means an expert (or the maintainer) but I would be happy to give some guidance if you'd like. Hope you find it to be fun!

[joshlf]

Hey folks! Sorry I've been silent on this issue; I've been swamped with other stuff.

@gsquire I did see your submission. I'll be honest, I'm kinda on the fence about this in general. I agree that, in general, taking AsRef<[u8]> is more ergonomic for callers. However, in the case of cryptography in particular, there's a benefit to forcing the caller to be more explicit in what they're doing since it can often have security implications. In other words, if calling as_ref can have side effects, it's probably not good for Mundane to be calling it implicitly. It's not that much of a burden for a caller to do foo(arg.as_ref()) instead of foo(arg), and the former makes it much clearer to others reading the code that as_ref is being called.

I'm happy to hear alternative perspectives on this, though!

[gsquire]

All good! I made this issue as more of a question than anything. Thanks for sharing your input though. I can close my patch and this issue unless anyone has a more salient point than I do.

[joshlf]

Please don't think of this as me shutting this down - it's just my opinion.

And in any case, even if we end up deciding to close this, we'd love to have your contributions on other issues! There's much work to be done :)

[pop]

Hey @pop, I started on it here but if you are looking to contribute, feel free to take it over. I am by no means an expert (or the maintainer) but I would be happy to give some guidance if you'd like. Hope you find it to be fun!

No worries, it's all yours @gsquire.