# A Rust hexadecimal decoding library
General purpose hex encoding/decoding library with a conservative MSRV and dependency policy.
**You're currently looking at the stable crate which has advanced features removed** to make
stabilization quicker and thus allowing downstream crates to stabilize quicker too. To get the
full feature set check the lower (0.x.y) versions. Read Stabilization strategy section for more
information.
## Stabilization strategy
Because downstream crates may need to return hex errors in their APIs and they need to be
stabilized soon, this crate only exposes the errors and two basic decoding functions. This
should already help with the vast majority of the cases and we're sufficiently confident that
these errors won't have a breaking change any time soon (possibly never).
If you're writing a binary you don't need to worry about any of this and just use the unstable
version for now. If you're writing a library you should use these stable errors in the API but
you may internally depend on the unstable crate version to get the advanced features that won't
affect your API. This way your API can stabilize before all features in this crate are fully
stable and you still can use all of them.
## Crate feature flags
* `std` - enables the standard library, on by default.
* `alloc` - enables features that require allocation such as decoding into `Vec<u8>`, implied
by `std`.
* `newer-rust-version` - enables Rust version detection and thus newer features, may add
dependency on a feature detection crate to reduce compile times. This
feature is expected to do nothing once the native detection is in Rust
and our MSRV is at least that version. We may also remove the feature
gate in 2.0 with semver trick once that happens.
## Minimum Supported Rust Version (MSRV)
This library should compile with almost any combination of features on **Rust 1.63.0**, however we
reserve the right to use features to guard compiler specific code so `--all-features` may not work
using the MSRV toolchain.
### Policy
We don't intend to bump MSRV until the newer Rust version is at least two years old and also
included in Debian stable (1.63 is in Debian 12 at the moment).
Note though that the dependencies may have looser policy. This is not considered
breaking/wrong - you would just need to pin them in `Cargo.lock` (not `.toml`).