Re: Library granularity

[Stephen Irons <stephen.irons@...>]

On 27 November 2016 at 08:35, Phil Leblanc <philanc@gmail.com> wrote:

Hi all,

snip

I have decided to share this library, but I don't know if it is the
right "granularity":

Would you prefer to look for and use one library including all these functions?

Or have three libraries with, say, compression, crypto and binary encoding?

Or have several tiny libraries (eg. base58, LZF, rc4, md5, etc.)?

It seems to me that it depends on the application that uses the library, as well as your altruism index.

There is usually one library developer, but potentially many application developers. If your altruism index is high, you (the library developer) might want to do the extra work to split up the library.

If the application needs to cope with any encryption that comes at it, it needs a general purpose encryption library with all the bells and whistle. It makes everyone's life easier to have one all-encompassing library.

If the application only needs to talk to a single destination using one chosen encryption algorithm, AND is running on a resource-constrained application, it might prefer incorporate only the algorithm that it needs. An all-encompassing library might make this difficult for (many) application developers. A finely-grained library might make it easier for (many) application developers, but will make it harder for the (one) library developer.

Stephen