Nettle is a cryptographic library that is designed to fit easily in more or
less any context: In crypto toolkits for object-oriented languages (C++,
Python, Pike, ...), in applications like LSH or GNUPG, or even in kernel
space.
It tries to resolve a problem of providing a common set of
cryptographic algorithms for higher-level application by implementing a
context-independent set of cryptographic algorithms. In that light, Nettle
doesn't do any memory allocation or I/O, it simply provides the
cryptographic algorithms for the application to use in any environment and
in any way it needs.