Bitter

Reading bits until the bitter end

Bitter takes a slice of byte data and reads bits in a desired endian format platform agonistically.

Features

• ✔ support for little endian, big endian, and native endian formats
• ✔ request an arbitrary amount of bits (up to 64 bits)
• ✔ ergonomic requests for common data types (eg: u8 ... u64, f32, etc)
• ✔ > 5 GB/s throughput when reading large number of bits
• ✔ > 1 GB/s throughput when reading single digit sized chunks of bits
• ✔ two APIs: one for safety and one for speed
• ✔ zero allocations
• ✔ zero dependencies
• ✔ no_std compatible

Example

use bitter::{BitReader, LittleEndianReader};
let mut bitter = LittleEndianReader::new(&[0xff, 0x04]);
assert_eq!(bitter.read_bit(), Some(true));
assert_eq!(bitter.read_u8(), Some(0x7f));
assert_eq!(bitter.read_bits(7), Some(0x02));

There are two main APIs available: checked and unchecked functions. The above example uses the checked API as return types are options to designate that there wasn't sufficient data to complete the read. Unchecked APIs will exhibit undefined behavior if there is not enough data left, but can be significantly faster.

Tips:

• Prefer checked functions for all but the most performance critical code
• Group all unchecked functions in a single block guarded by a has_bits_remaining call

Below is a demonstration of the unchecked APIs with a guard to ensure safety:

use bitter::{BitReader, LittleEndianReader};
let mut bitter = LittleEndianReader::new(&[0xff, 0x04]);
if bitter.has_bits_remaining(16) {
    assert_eq!(bitter.read_bit_unchecked(), true);
    assert_eq!(bitter.read_u8_unchecked(), 0x7f);
    assert_eq!(bitter.read_bits_unchecked(7), 0x02);
}

Another guard usage:

use bitter::{BitReader, LittleEndianReader};
let mut bitter = LittleEndianReader::new(&[0xff, 0x04]);
if bitter.has_bits_remaining(16) {
    for _ in 0..8 {
        assert_eq!(bitter.read_bit_unchecked(), true);
    }
    assert_eq!(bitter.read_u8_unchecked(), 0x04);
}

no_std crates

This crate has a feature, std, that is enabled by default. To use this crate in a no_std context, add the following to your Cargo.toml:

[dependencies]
bitter = { version = "x", default-features = false }

Comparison to other libraries

Bitter is hardly the first Rust library for handling bits. nom, bitvec, bitstream_io, and bitreader are all crates that deal with bit reading. The reason why someone would choose bitter is speed.

Benchmarking

Benchmarks are ran with the following command:

cargo clean
RUSTFLAGS="-C target-cpu=native" cargo bench -- bit-reading
find ./target -path "*bit-reading*" -wholename "*/new/raw.csv" -print0 \
  | xargs -0 xsv cat rows > assets/benchmark-data.csv

And can be analyzed with the R script found in the assets directory. Keep in mind, benchmarks will vary by machine

Takeaways from the above chart:

• Bitter unchecked APIs yield the greatest throughput (reads per second)
• Bitter checked APIs cost less than half the throughput of bitter unchecked APIs
• Bitter is 2x-6x faster than other libraries depending on the read size