2.7 KiB
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 functions 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
Bincode in the wild
- google/tarpc: Bincode is used to serialize and deserialize networked RPC messages.
- servo/webrender: Bincode records webrender API calls for record/replay-style graphics debugging.
- servo/icp-channel: Ipc-Channel uses Bincode to send structs between processes using a channel-like API.
Example
extern crate bincode;
extern crate rustc_serialize;
use bincode::SizeLimit;
use bincode::rustc_serialize::{encode, decode};
#[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> = 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 = decode(&encoded[..]).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:
isize
/usize
are encoded asi64
/u64
, for portability.- enums variants are encoded as a
u32
instead of auint
.u32
is enough for all practical uses. str
is encoded as(u64, &[u8])
, where theu64
is the number of bytes contained in the encoded string.