🎓 Rust Crate Experiment | byte-repr

A lightweight utility for inspecting and learning about memory representation of integer types in Rust.

📘 Overview

byte-repr is a simple, extensible Rust crate to help visualize how numeric types are represented in memory. It supports both little-endian and big-endian byte formats, binary representation, and hex with zero-padding.

Useful for:

• 🧠 Learning & teaching endianness and bit-level encoding
• 🛠️ Debugging binary data
• 🧬 Understanding low-level memory layouts in Rust

✨ Features

• 📦 Print values in:
  • Binary format (grouped bits)
  • Little-endian byte array
  • Big-endian byte array
  • Hexadecimal representation (zero-padded)
• 🧩 Macro-based extensibility for custom numeric types
• 🧪 Tested against all supported integer types
• 🎨 Color-coded output for clarity

🚀 Usage

Add this to your Cargo.toml:

[dependencies]
byte-repr = "0.1.0" # update after publishing

Then use in your code:

use byte_repr::represent;

fn main() {
    let x = 42u16;
    represent(&x);
}

Example Output:

🔧 Supported Types

Currently supports:

• i8
• u16
• u32
• u64
• u128
• usize

✅ impl_byterep! macro makes it easy to extend support to custom numeric types.

⚠️ Limitations

• ❌ Not yet #![no_std] compatible

• ❌ No support for wasm32 (WebAssembly) targets

• 📌 Relies on println! for display, which isn't available in no_std or wasm

✅ These will be addressed in upcoming versions. Stay tuned!

🧪 Tests

Includes integration tests for:

• Endianness checks
• Binary and hex formatting
• Trait conformance per type
• Visual rendering test (smoke check)

📦 License

• Licensed under the MIT License.

See the LICENSE-MIT file for details.

📑 Changelog

See CHANGELOG.md for a history of changes.