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Comment by biftek | Hacker News Reader

I'm not sure what's involved with getting assembly working in Go (my experience has only been with servers/clients and CLI's), but could this not have been implemented as a stand alone package? What's the benefit of a fork in this case?

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I'm also wondering the answer to this question. To my understanding, go-crypto is actually maintained separately from the Go stdlib by the Go developers[0]. So why isn't this just a fork of crypto? Why fork the entire language? Why can't this be upstreamed?

[0]: https://github.com/golang/crypto

This is a library of supplemental crypto algorithms. You won't see things like AES, SHA-2, or the NIST curves in here. Those things are part of the standard library in Go.

I can't speak for Cloudflare, but I would guess that they want these changes to be merged upstream. If that happens, the benefit is that consumers of the stdlib crypto API will get increased security and performance for free in a future update.

> I can't speak for Cloudflare, but I would guess that they want these changes to be merged upstream. If that happens, the benefit is that consumers of the stdlib crypto API will get increased security and performance for free in a future update.

Yes, they do: https://go-review.googlesource.com/#/c/8968/

I'm also wondering, why fork the compiler? What if another company forks Go to implement, say, a faster spam filter. How would one ever combine these two forks?

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