Binary Encoder / Decoder

A compact encoder / decoder pair that uses an binary zero-fluff encoding scheme. The size of the encoded object will be the same or smaller than the size that the object takes up in memory in a running Rust program.

In addition to exposing two simple funcitons that encode to Vec and decode from Vec, binary-encode exposes a Reader/Writer API that makes it work perfectly with other stream-based apis such as rust files, network streams, and the flate2-rs compression library.

Api Documentation

Example

#![feature(old_orphan_check)]

extern crate bincode;
extern crate "rustc-serialize" as rustc_serialize;

use bincode::SizeLimit;

#[derive(RustcEncodable, RustcDecodable, PartialEq)]
struct Entity {
    x: f32,
    y: f32,
}

#[derive(RustcEncodable, RustcDecodable, PartialEq)]
struct World {
    entities: Vec<Entity>
}

fn main() {
    let world = World {
        entities: vec![Entity {x: 0.0, y: 4.0}, Entity {x: 10.0, y: 20.5}]
    };

    let encoded: Vec<u8> = bincode::encode(&world, SizeLimit::Infinite).unwrap();
    // 8 bytes for the length of the vector, 4 bytes per float.
    assert_eq!(encoded.len(), 8 + 4 * 4);
    let decoded: World = bincode::decode(encoded, SizeLimit::Infinite).unwrap();

    assert!(world == decoded);
}

Details

The encoding (and thus decoding) proceeds unsurprisingly -- primitive types are encoded according to the underlying Writer, tuples and structs are encoded by encoding their fields one-by-one, and enums are encoded by first writing out the tag representing the variant and then the contents.

However, there are some implementation details to be aware of:

• int/uint are encoded as i64/u64, for portability.
• enums variants are encoded as a u32 instead that as a uint. u32 is enough for all practical uses.
• str is encoded as (u64, &[u8]), where the u64 is the number of bytes contained in the encoded string.