I am proposing the addition of a very simple helper to return the hash of a file.

Hey Tarek, long time no see!

* the _sha256 module is optional, can be disabled and is not available in some distributions.

* I also don't like to use sha256 has default. It's slow, even slower than sha512. Any default makes it also harder to upgrade to a better, more secure default in the future.

* like hmac.new() a file_digest() should accept PEP 452-compatible arguments and hash name as digstmod argument, not just a callable.

* a filename argument prevents users from passing in file-like objects like BytesIO.

* 4096 bytes chunk size is very conservative. The call overhead for read() and update() may dominate the performance of the function.

* The hex argument feels weird.

In a perfect world, the hash and hmac objects should get an "update_file" method. The OpenSSL-based hashes could even release the GIL and utilize OpenSSL's BIO layer to avoid any Python overhead.

Hey Christian, I hope things are well for you!
Thanks for all the precious feedback, I'll rework the patch accordingly