Bitcode

A binary encoder/decoder with the following goals:

• 🔥 Blazingly fast
• 🐁 Tiny serialized size
• 💎 Highly compressible by Deflate/LZ4/Zstd

In contrast, these are non-goals:

• Stable format across major versions
• Self describing format
• Compatibility with languages other than Rust

See rust_serialization_benchmark for benchmarks.

Example

use bitcode::{Encode, Decode};

#[derive(Encode, Decode, PartialEq, Debug)]
struct Foo<'a> {
    x: u32,
    y: &'a str,
}

let original = Foo {
    x: 10,
    y: "abc",
};

let encoded: Vec<u8> = bitcode::encode(&original); // No error
let decoded: Foo<'_> = bitcode::decode(&encoded).unwrap();
assert_eq!(original, decoded);

Library Example

Add bitcode to libraries without specifying the major version so binary crates can pick the version. This is a minimal stable subset of the bitcode API so avoid using any other functionality.

bitcode = { version = "0", features = ["derive"], default-features = false, optional = true }

#[cfg_attr(feature = "bitcode", derive(bitcode::Encode, bitcode::Decode))]
pub struct Vec2 {
    x: f32,
    y: f32,
}

Tuple vs Array

If you have multiple values of the same type:

• Use a tuple or struct when the values are semantically different: x: u32, y: u32
• Use an array when all values are semantically similar: pixels: [u8; 16]

Implementation Details

• Heavily inspired by https://github.com/That3Percent/tree-buf
• All instances of each field are grouped together making compression easier
• Uses smaller integers where possible all the way down to 1 bit
• Validation is performed up front on typed vectors before deserialization
• Code is designed to be auto-vectorized by LLVM

License

Licensed under either of

• Apache License, Version 2.0 (LICENSE-APACHE or http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0)
• MIT license (LICENSE-MIT or http://opensource.org/licenses/MIT)

at your option.

Contribution

Unless you explicitly state otherwise, any contribution intentionally submitted for inclusion in the work by you, as defined in the Apache-2.0 license, shall be dual licensed as above, without any additional terms or conditions.