JAJach·Nov 9, 2025
Ironclad is also the name of the chief cryptographic library for Common Lisp: https://github.com/sharplispers/ironclad/
In Ironclad – formally verified, real-time capable, Unix-like OS kernelsharplispers
ironclad
Common Lisp2022–2025
sharplispers / ironclad
ironclad
A cryptographic toolkit written in Common Lisp
4Distinct people
6Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
209GitHub stars
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What it is
A cryptographic toolkit written in Common Lisp
GitHub
Where it is used
No documented product use has been verified yet.
What people are saying
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This week on Hacker News
Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 5:04:57 PM UTC.
No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.
Mentions over time
HN mentions by year6 dated mentions
Observed mentions: 2022-11-04 11:30:02 UTC to 2025-11-09 09:02:17 UTC.
Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.
View mention counts and date ranges
| Period | Start (UTC) | End (exclusive, UTC) | Mentions | Submissions | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2022 | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2023 | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2024 | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 3 | 0 | 3 |
| 2025 | 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2 | 0 | 2 |
What Hacker News says
6 sources[u/forgot-CLHS](https://www.reddit.com/r/lisp/comments/1ikrz1g/shout_out_to_...) notes that Common Lisp's defact standard cryptography library Ironclad's [implementation](https://github.com/sharplispers/ironclad/blob/master/src/kdf...) avoids such problems!
```
(defmethod derive-key ((kdf bcrypt) passphrase salt iteration-count key-length)
(declare (type (simple-array (unsigned-byte 8) (*)) passphrase salt))
(unless (<= (length passphrase) 72)
(error 'ironclad-error
:format-control "PASSPHRASE must be at most 72 bytes long."))...)
```
In Okta Bcrypt incident lessons for designing better APIsI think this is cool, but how sure are the authors that this is side-channel safe? There is a similar (modular, high performance, zero-dependency) library in Common Lisp but it can't give side-channel guarantees due to how some Common Lisp compilers implement integer and arithmetic functions
https://github.com/sharplispers/ironclad
In Constantine: modular, high-performance, zero-dependency cryptography stackA "real life" example of this can be found in the Ironclad cryptography library [0]. It uses this to add support for AES instructions and some other niche assembly instructions to generate fast (at least a lot faster than it would have been) cryptography code.
https://github.com/sharplispers/ironclad/blob/master/src/opt...
In SBCL: The Assembly Code BreadboardThis is somewhat of a side question, but do you have an opinion on Ironclad, the Common Lisp encryption library?
https://github.com/sharplispers/ironclad
In RSA is deceptively simple and funyou shouldn't be attacked. i think its just that these type of questions do get asked a lot of time just to troll. i personally also think its a bad question because someone can give you a valid answer and you might not find the answer interesting. instead maybe it's better to ask something like:
Q: is there an interesting 3D graphics software being developed in Lisp?
A: https://github.com/kaveh808/kons-9
Q: is there an interesting GUI project being developed in Lisp?
A: https://github.com/rabbibotton/clog
Q: is there an interesting HPC project being developed in Lisp?
A: https://github.com/marcoheisig/Petalisp
Q: is there an interesting cryptography library being developed in Lisp?
A: https://github.com/sharplispers/ironclad
see how different these domains are? its unlikely someone will find more than one of these projects interesting
In Why Lisp?