Expand description
Provides abstractions for working with bytes.
The bytes
crate provides an efficient byte buffer structure
(Bytes
) and traits for working with buffer
implementations (Buf
, BufMut
).
Bytes
Bytes
is an efficient container for storing and operating on contiguous
slices of memory. It is intended for use primarily in networking code, but
could have applications elsewhere as well.
Bytes
values facilitate zero-copy network programming by allowing multiple
Bytes
objects to point to the same underlying memory. This is managed by
using a reference count to track when the memory is no longer needed and can
be freed.
A Bytes
handle can be created directly from an existing byte store (such as &[u8]
or Vec<u8>
), but usually a BytesMut
is used first and written to. For
example:
use bytes::{BytesMut, BufMut};
let mut buf = BytesMut::with_capacity(1024);
buf.put(&b"hello world"[..]);
buf.put_u16(1234);
let a = buf.split();
assert_eq!(a, b"hello world\x04\xD2"[..]);
buf.put(&b"goodbye world"[..]);
let b = buf.split();
assert_eq!(b, b"goodbye world"[..]);
assert_eq!(buf.capacity(), 998);
In the above example, only a single buffer of 1024 is allocated. The handles
a
and b
will share the underlying buffer and maintain indices tracking
the view into the buffer represented by the handle.
See the struct docs for more details.
Buf
, BufMut
These two traits provide read and write access to buffers. The underlying
storage may or may not be in contiguous memory. For example, Bytes
is a
buffer that guarantees contiguous memory, but a rope stores the bytes in
disjoint chunks. Buf
and BufMut
maintain cursors tracking the current
position in the underlying byte storage. When bytes are read or written, the
cursor is advanced.
Relation with Read
and Write
At first glance, it may seem that Buf
and BufMut
overlap in
functionality with std::io::Read
and std::io::Write
. However, they
serve different purposes. A buffer is the value that is provided as an
argument to Read::read
and Write::write
. Read
and Write
may then
perform a syscall, which has the potential of failing. Operations on Buf
and BufMut
are infallible.
Modules
- Utilities for working with buffers.
Structs
- A cheaply cloneable and sliceable chunk of contiguous memory.
- A unique reference to a contiguous slice of memory.
Traits
- Read bytes from a buffer.
- A trait for values that provide sequential write access to bytes.