bin-layout

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Very fast! And flexible, This library used to serialize and deserialize data in binary format.

Endianness

By default, the library uses little endian. If you want to use big endian, you can set BE features flag. And for native endian use NE. For example:

[dependencies]
bin-layout = { version = "7", features = ["BE"] }

Examples

use bin_layout::*;

#[derive(Encoder, Decoder)]
struct Car<'a> {
    year: u16,
    is_new: bool,
    name: &'a str,
}

#[derive(Encoder, Decoder)]
struct Company<'a> { name: String, cars: Vec<Car<'a>> }

let old = Company {
    name: "Tesla".into(),
    cars: vec![
        Car { name: "Model S", year: 2018, is_new: true },
        Car { name: "Model X", year: 2019, is_new: false },
    ],
};
let bytes = old.encode();
let new = Company::decode(&bytes);

• Zero-copy deserialization: mean that no data is copied. Dynamic length data (Vec, String, &[T], &str etc..) are encoded with their length value first, Following by each entry.

use bin_layout::*;

#[derive(Encoder, Decoder)]
struct Msg<'a> {
    id: u8,
    data: &'a str,
}
let bytes = [42, 13, 72, 101, 108, 108, 111, 44, 32, 87, 111, 114, 108, 100, 33];
//           ^^  ^^  ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
//           Id  Len                         Data

let msg = Msg::decode(&bytes).unwrap();
assert_eq!(msg.id, 42);
assert_eq!(msg.data, "Hello, World!"); // Here, data is referenced.

• In this example, The following structs, don't have any dynamic length data. So we can have a fixed size buffer at compile time.

use bin_layout::*;

#[derive(Encoder, Decoder)]
struct Date {
    year: u16,
    month: u8,
    day: u8,
}

#[derive(Encoder, Decoder)]
struct Record {
    id: u32,
    date: Date,
    value: [u8; 512],
}

let record = Record { id: 42, date: Date { year: 2018, month: 3, day: 7 }, value: [1; 512] };
let mut writer = [0; 520];
record.encoder(&mut writer.as_mut_slice());

• It's very easy to implement Encoder or Decoder trait. For example:

use std::io;
use bin_layout::*;

type DynErr = Box<dyn std::error::Error + Send + Sync>;

#[derive(Encoder, Decoder)]
struct Bar(u16);
struct Foo { x: u8, y: Bar }

impl Encoder for Foo {
    fn encoder(&self, c: &mut impl io::Write) -> io::Result<()> {
        self.x.encoder(c)?;
        self.y.encoder(c)
    }
}
impl Decoder<'_> for Foo {
    fn decoder(c: &mut &[u8]) -> Result<Self, DynErr> {
        Ok(Self {
            x: u8::decoder(c)?,
            y: Bar::decoder(c)?,
        })
    }
}

Variable-Length Integer Encoding

This encoding ensures that smaller integer values need fewer bytes to encode. Support types are L2 and L3, both are encoded in little endian.

By default, L3 (u22) is used to encode length (integer) for record. But you override it by setting L2 (u15) in features flag.

Encoding algorithm is very straightforward, reserving one or two most significant bits of the first byte to encode rest of the length.

L2

L3

For example, Binary representation of 0x_C0DE is 0x_11_00000011_011110

L3(0x_C0DE) is encoded in 3 bytes:

1st byte: 11_011110      # MSB is 11, so read next 2 bytes
2nd byte:        11
3rd byte:        11

Another example, L3(107) is encoded in just 1 byte:

1st byte: 0_1101011      # MSB is 0, So we don't have to read extra bytes.

Fixed-Length Collections

Record can be used to encode collections where the size of the length is known.

For example, Record<u8, String> here the maximum allowed payload length is 255 (u8::MAX)