2) Wow, those downsides are insane. It's not constant time, thus can't be used in cryptography...? Has huge performance impacts and can't be casted to a "number"- how is this implemented? it can't be native INTs on the CPU?
Is this to optimise memory operations over a large plaintext/cipher text or is there some other advantage to it that is less obvious (e.g. more resistant to timing attacks?)
2) Wow, those downsides are insane. It's not constant time, thus can't be used in cryptography...? Has huge performance impacts and can't be casted to a "number"- how is this implemented? it can't be native INTs on the CPU?