bitio-rs

🚀A lightweight Rust library for bit-level I/O: read, write, peek, with both big-endian and little-endian support.

Features

• Read arbitrary-length bit fields from any Read source (1–64 bits)
• Write arbitrary-length bit fields to any Write sink
• Peek bits without consuming them
• Fully endian-aware (BigEndian / LittleEndian)
• Two performance tiers:
  • Standard: Safe, validated standard implementation
  • Fast: 18-21x faster for performance-critical use
• minimal dependencies

Installation

Add the following to your Cargo.toml:

[dependencies]
bitio-rs = "0.1.2"

Quickstart

See quickstart.rs

Choosing an Implementation

• Standard BitReader:

  • Full error checking
  • Recommended for general use

• BulkBitReader

  • For bulk read
  • Slower than the standard version

• FastBitReader:

  • 18-21x faster (see benchmarks)
  • Use at your own risk

Performance Comparison

Benchmarks measured on Apple M4 (16GB RAM):

Performance vs Compatibility Tradeoff: Fast implementations achieve 10-21x speedup but:

• Incompatible API
• Recommended only for performance-critical sections