allocz · With the support of vinteum I created a Go secp256k1 library that works both with and without CGO (which is the way Go does foreign function interfaces). When CGO is enabled, the implementation used is libsecp256k1, when CGO is not enabled (or the system does not have a C compiler) the secp256k1 implementation used is dcrec, a pure Go secp256k1 library that is used by btcd.
The benchmarks show that when using CGO, ECDSA and Schnorr signature verification time per call drop at least 70%, which is a speedup of ~350%.
It is common for several Go projects to not allow code that interfaces with C, because it hurts portability, since cross compilation setting GOOSand GOARCHstop working. This implementation avoids this issue by using the slower and portable implementation when CGO is not used, so cross compilation will always work when setting the environment variable CGO_ENABLED=0.
Would be nice to get feedback from other devs. Thanks for reading!