Performance

[tevador]

I haven't been able to reproduce the performance figures that are listed in the README.

I used Intel i5-2500K (Sandy Bridge from 2011) running at 3.29 GHz (Turbo disabled), Windows 10 and binaries built with Visual Studio 2019 in x64 Release configuration.

Snowshoe Unit Tester: EC Scalar Multiplication
RDTSC instruction runs at 3.29252 GHz
+ ec_elligator: `33772` median cycles, `10.3136` avg usec
+ ec_mul_gen: `114412` median cycles, `34.8923` avg usec
+ ec_mul: `337620` median cycles, `102.747` avg usec
+ ec_simul_gen: `389280` median cycles, `118.303` avg usec
+ ec_simul: `469072` median cycles, `142.706` avg usec

This is 2-2.5 times slower than the presented cycle counts for Sandy Bridge. Any explanation for this discrepancy? Are some optimizations not enabled for Windows/MSVC?

[catid]

Not sure why! These days I'd recommend not to use this library and instead use one of the more active projects.