gecko-dev/third_party/rust/bincode/readme.dev.md

Bincode

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

^code(./examples/basic.rs)

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:

• isize/usize 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.