sha256-simd VS avo

BLAKE3 is faster than hardware accelerated SHA-2 because the tree mode used in BLAKE3 allows hashing parts of a single message in parallel (with SHA-2, parts of a single message have to be hashed one after another, and parallelism is only used in workloads where you process multiple messages at the same time).

https://github.com/minio/sha256-simd

https://github.com/BLAKE3-team/BLAKE3

SHA256 is high quality but typically a bit slower. Next Go version will have faster SHA256 on some amd64 CPUs - until then you can try sha256-simd which offers the same.

I am not sure, if you can achieve a reasonable speed with Python though. You probably have to use a compiled language or run it on GPU. I found this very fast implemenation in Go which uses special CPU instructions (the AVX2 or SHA extensionsm depending on your CPU model) to speed up the calculation: https://github.com/minio/sha256-simd

I wonder whether avo could have been useful here?[1] I mention it because it came up the last time we were talking about AVX operations in go.[2]

1 = https://github.com/mmcloughlin/avo

2 = https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34465297

I thought the /r/golang comments on this post were pretty useful[1]. They also introduced me to avo[2], a tool for generating x86 assembly from go that I hadn't seen before. There are some examples listed on the avo github page for generating AVX512 instructions with avo.

1 = https://www.reddit.com/r/golang/comments/10hmh07/how_to_use_...

2 = https://github.com/mmcloughlin/avo

For writing AVX512 from scratch avo is a much better alternative.

Avo is a library that simplifies writing complex go assembly, I found it very useful to figure out how instructions map onto Go's asm syntax. But you could definitely do the translation directly, it's what c2goasm did (couldn't get it to work reliably unfortunately).

Curious if you're looking at using avo to write the assembly

You can use github.com/mmcloughlin/avo for generating the assembly use Go.

For normal and "better" mode I am using avo to generate different encoders for different input sizes, with and without Snappy compatibility. That currently outputs about 17k lines of assembly.

You could perhaps just have the Go compiler generate the assembler for your code:

go tool compile -S file.go > file_amd64.s

Then you could verify it doesn't change over time, and choose to begin maintaining by hand if it makes sense.

If you do want to go the route of rolling it yourself, I'd suggest looking into something like Avo: https://github.com/mmcloughlin/avo

If you have to go with Assembly, try Avo https://github.com/mmcloughlin/avo