44 lines
2.1 KiB
Markdown
44 lines
2.1 KiB
Markdown
extends: post.liquid
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title: A Rust library for LibLZF
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date: 15 Oct 2014 11:10:00 +0200
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path: /:year/:month/:day/a-rust-library-for-liblzf
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---
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In the last four months I did not produce much open-source code. I was busy writing my Bachelor Thesis.
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But I was active in the community, I attended several conferences, I read a lot of stuff and I wrote down a lot more things to do.
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One of these things was "learn Rust", as you might figure (and writing more).
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Well, I submitted my thesis on Monday and went on to write some actual Rust code.
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So I created [lzf-rs][], a wrapper around [LibLZF][], a super small and fast compression library, originally written by Marc Lehmann.
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LibLZF consists of just 4 files and is super-easy to compile as a small library.
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LibLZF itself is used by [Redis](https://github.com/antirez/redis/blob/3c6f9ac37c849c82aebf5b45e895faa6cc80e7be/src/rdb.c#L222) for compressing strings in the RDB,
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that's how I got to know it. I still don't know how it works, but I want to learn it now (and maybe port the whole code to Rust instead of using a wrapper around the C library?)
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I used Rust's [Foreign Function Interface][ffi] to write the wrapper. Accessing C code from within Rust is quite simple.
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The hard part is choosing the right data types and writing the API in a safe and usable way.
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I'm not 100% happy with the current API of lzf-rs, so expect it to change.
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I'm still in the process of figuring out what to expose and what not.
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And now, enough of the talking. This is how to use the library:
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~~~rust
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use lzf;
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fn main() {
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let data = "foobar";
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let compressed = lzf::compress(data.as_bytes()).unwrap();
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let decompressed = lzf::decompress(compressed.as_slice(), data.len()).unwrap();
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}
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~~~
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I'm happy to get some feedback. It's my first serious Rust code, so prone to bugs and maybe not to Rusty afterall.
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Ping me on [Twitter][], drop me an [email](mailto:badboy@archlinux.us) or [open an issue](https://github.com/badboy/lzf-rs/issues).
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[lzf-rs]: https://github.com/badboy/lzf-rs
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[liblzf]: http://software.schmorp.de/pkg/liblzf.html
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[ffi]: http://doc.rust-lang.org/guide-ffi.html
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[twitter]: https://twitter.com/badboy_
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