Rust VDIF

A rust crate for interacting with data encoded in the VLBI Data Interchange Format (VDIF), commonly used in radio astronomy experiments. The VDIF data format is defined in the VDIF specification.

This is a minimalist crate designed to relieve the problem of dealing with VDIF data in your own applications.

With rustvdif you can:

• Read VDIF frames from and write to various sources, including files and sockets
• Create and interact with VDIF headers
• Read/write VDIF data encoded using the VDIF Transport Protocol (VTP)
• Easily encode and decode VDIF header fields
• Access VDIF payload data in u32 or byte form
• Encode and decode VDIF payloads, with up to 32 bits/sample

Documentation is available here. If you haven't come across VDIF before, I recommend reading the VDIF specification linked above as it is actually quite readable.

Extra features

This crate also contains a number of utilities that are useful for building applications using VDIF data. These include:

• A single-producer single-consumer lock-free ring buffer specifically for VDIF frames. Based on the rtrb crate
• A UDP/VTP receiver type built specifically to utilise the recvmmsg Linux system call, since VDIF frames are often received over UDP in large volumes

Contributing

I'd love to see contributions from the VLBI community, and if you have any suggestions or questions you can always reach out to me directly or open an issue.

Known Issues

Since VDIF is an explicitly little-endian format, supporting big-endian systems takes a bit of extra effort. So big-endian systems aren't currently supported, but I could probably be persuaded to implement support if someone needs it.

Licensing

This library is licensed under either the MIT License or the Apache 2.0 License at your option.