BigBit

This is an implementation of the BigBit standard, used for representing arbitrarily large numbers and strings in a compact way. The only implementation provided by the author is a Node.js implementation — this crate aims to implement the functionality presented there with idiomatic Rust code.

In short, the specification describes 3 formats:

• Head Byte (HB), used for storing extremely large (but still finitely large) signed integers and decimal fractions without losing precision
• Extended Head Byte (EHB), used for storing arbitrarily large signed integers and decimal fractions without losing precision as long as sufficent storage space is provided.
• Linked Bytes (LB), used for storing arbitrarily large unsigned integers, mainly used directly inside the Extended Head Byte format to store the exponent and the number of additional coefficient bytes, but also useful for storing strings better than both UTF-8 and UTF-16.

Since this is a format parser, #![no_std] is enabled by default, meaning that alloc is the only dependency, allowing you to use this in a freestanding environment.

State

Currently, not the entire BigBit standard is implemented, and the crate is not ready for use in production just yet. There are also no stability guarantees whatsoever. Here's a list of what's already done:

• Head Byte number storage (not really finished, just a stub)
• Linked Bytes number storage and arithmetic
• Converting Linked Bytes to and from primitive integers
• Displaying Linked Bytes numbers in binary, octal, decimal and hexadecimal using formatters as well as other bases (arbitrary from 2 to 36) using a dedicated method
• Borrowed Linked Bytes (required for EHB) — a Linked Bytes number which doesn't own its contents and is a slice into an EHB number (still a stub)

And here's a list of what's not finished just yet:

• Creating [E]HB numbers from primitive integers and f32/f64 (most likely will be added in 0.1.0)
• The Extended Header Byte format (will be added in 0.0.x)
• Arithmetic operations (addition, subtraction, multiplication and division are all defined by the BigBit standard) for [E]HB; the main issue is dealing with the exponents (will mark the 1.0.0 release, might be partially added over the course of 0.x.x releases)
• Strings encoded using Linked Bytes (will be added in 0.0.x)
• Debug and Display formatting for [E]HB (i.e. converting the numbers either into a debugging-friendly representation as an array of bytes or a string representing the number in decimal scientific notation or full notation, as well as other numeric notations; simple Debug and Display decimal formatting will be added in 0.1.0 while the rest is planned for 1.0.0)
• Tests (planned for 0.1.0 but might be partially added earlier)

Changelog

The full version history can be found here.