Improve portability: Usage as library in Go, JS, C/C++/C#, PHP, ...

[binwiederhier]

(This is a continuation of the discussion on HN.)

Thank you very much for creating age. I'm hoping it'll become the new OpenPGP. It looks fantastic. I have some suggestions below, but of course those are just suggestions. Feel free to ignore them if you like. 😄

If it is your desire to grow age to be the new file encryption format (and I really hope it is), there should be implementations of it in a wide range of languages, and it should be possible to easily use it in your own language, without having to shell out.

I'm thinking about something like this:

import ".../age"

func main() {
  age.Encrypt(...)
}

and

<?php

age_encrypt(...);

and so on. You get the idea.

Given that implementing age in all these languages is a lot of work, I suggest you create a CONTRIBUTING.md file and make it clear that you'll looking for people to create/maintain native implementations.

If there is already a way to use age as a library in these languages, then maybe the documentation should be improved to show how to use it like that. I couldn't find anything but the spec and the man page.

Again: Thanks for creating age. And feel free to ignore this. 😄

Side note: I'm very pleased that this discussion has the number 404. 😄

[str4d]

Current library implementations I am aware of:

• Go: https://github.com/FiloSottile/age (this one 🙂)
• Rust: https://github.com/str4d/rage
• WASM / JS: https://github.com/str4d/wage (wraps rage, still in development)
• Python: https://github.com/kushaldas/pyage (wraps rage)

[str4d]

I'm also looking into using https://github.com/mozilla/uniffi-rs to generate bindings to rage, which would enable support for Kotlin, Swift, Python, and Ruby from a common base.

[binwiederhier]

Thank you for the responses, and thanks for making rage 😄. Cool that there are so many projects already. Maybe they should be listed in the main README too, at least the active ones. Though it looks like other than age+rage none of the other ones are active, sadly.