Crate bintext

Binary text encoding and decoding with support for SIMD (AVX2 and SSSE3) with good fallback performance.

The main idea of this crate is to have a zero copy binary deserialization for text formats.

How it works

Alignment can’t be guaranteed in a text format, so no matter what the data will need to be re-aligned while decoding, if the required alignment is N maximum amount of offset need to move the bytes is less than N thus by providing an start padding in the binary encoded text of N - 1 it’s possible to align the data up to N.

Quick note this crate will only accept padding equal or grater than N, because it’s a bit cheap to do this way.

// Padding of 8 (suppose it was read form a file)
let mut hex = "--------a1f7d5e8d14f0f76".to_string();

unsafe {
    // Decode with padding of 8 and alignment of 8
    let slice = bintext::hex::decode_aligned(&mut hex, 8, 8).unwrap();
    // Data is aligned so you can safely do this:
    let slice: &[u64] = std::slice::from_raw_parts(
       slice.as_ptr() as *const _,
       slice.len() / std::mem::size_of::<u64>()
    );
}

Modules

hex

Hex encoding and decoding