buf-ref-reader

Faster, growable buffering reader.

Use this crate to get faster reads in situations when all you need is immutable &[u8]s, the contents of which rarely need to outlive a single loop cycle.

See rustdoc for examples and to read more about how this crate works, its applicability and limitations.

Benchmarks

Reading lines from &[u8] as Read through 64k-sized buffer into the void:

test throttled_bufref_read_until_mmap_64      ... bench:   9,013,420 ns/iter (+/- 1,165,996)
test throttled_bufref_read_until_vec_64       ... bench:   8,769,302 ns/iter (+/- 772,987)
test throttled_std_read_until_64              ... bench:  12,244,424 ns/iter (+/- 841,098)

Populating HashMap with up to 2-, 3-, 4-, 5-byte prefixes of entries from /usr/share/dict/words, while only allocating memory for new map entries:

test baseline_hashmap_2    ... bench:   8,228,848 ns/iter (+/- 81,987)
test bufref_hashmap_mmap_2 ... bench:  11,042,118 ns/iter (+/- 62,980)
test bufref_hashmap_vec_2  ... bench:  10,613,380 ns/iter (+/- 45,901)
test std_hashmap_2         ... bench:  17,010,897 ns/iter (+/- 93,379)

test baseline_hashmap_3    ... bench:  10,426,822 ns/iter (+/- 119,331)
test bufref_hashmap_mmap_3 ... bench:  13,180,343 ns/iter (+/- 118,483)
test bufref_hashmap_vec_3  ... bench:  12,733,866 ns/iter (+/- 244,389)
test std_hashmap_3         ... bench:  19,470,906 ns/iter (+/- 106,113)

test baseline_hashmap_4    ... bench:  16,135,731 ns/iter (+/- 296,142)
test bufref_hashmap_mmap_4 ... bench:  18,887,024 ns/iter (+/- 267,410)
test bufref_hashmap_vec_4  ... bench:  18,375,449 ns/iter (+/- 292,666)
test std_hashmap_4         ... bench:  25,889,158 ns/iter (+/- 334,521)

test baseline_hashmap_5    ... bench:  26,379,467 ns/iter (+/- 806,691)
test bufref_hashmap_mmap_5 ... bench:  28,282,336 ns/iter (+/- 1,035,900)
test bufref_hashmap_vec_5  ... bench:  27,588,498 ns/iter (+/- 1,081,542)
test std_hashmap_5         ... bench:  35,321,514 ns/iter (+/- 1,114,093)

(baseline here shows the amount of time needed to populate map without any readers. It's here to show overhead for each reader.)

(N.B. MmapBuffer should generally be faster. It is not clear yet why it's not the case with its Rust implementation.)

Acknowledgement

The idea for initial implementation of this crate (the one that only featured VecBuffer) came from experiments with mawk, namely after applying first Futamura projection to one of awk scripts, which in turn was done to study mawk's exceptionally good performance. See source code for FINgets() to learn how mawk buffers its input.

License

Apache License 2.0