Content

Design goal of the Content storage/serialization backend.

Simple implementation of Content trait for any type

When implementing Content for your type, you need to provide only two methods, to_content that takes a Read, and produces a Self, and from_content, an example for u8:

impl Content for u8 {
    fn to_content(&self, sink: &mut Sink) -> Result<()> {
        sink.write_all(&[*self])
    }
    fn from_content(source: &mut Source) -> Result<Self> {
        let b = &mut [0u8];
        try!(source.read_exact(b));
        Ok(b[0])
    }
}

The Backend trait

The backend trait makes a type act as as storage for content addressed bytestreams, be it Vec<u8> or File. But it could also be a network interface, for example.

The type is the schema

Things that implement Content, implicitly know how to serialize and deserialize themselves, including knowing their length. And since types can nest other Content types within themselves, you basically get the whole schema and de/serialization for free.

Zero copy io

When a Content is put into a store, Reads and Writes are connected directly.