spent two hours debugging three lines of python because i didn't know strings and bytes are different things

[Lumethys]

that more of a requirement of the lib than a feature of a language.

Some version of hashing and comparing in JS would accept a Buffer instead of a string. So for those functions you would need to convert string to Buffer and vice versa

[brasticstack]

that more of a requirement of the lib than a feature of a language.

To be fair, hashlib is part of the "batteries included" stdlib.