base64

Made with CLion. Thanks to JetBrains for supporting open source!

It's base64. What more could anyone want?

This library's goals are to be correct and fast. It's thoroughly tested and widely used. It exposes functionality at multiple levels of abstraction so you can choose the level of convenience vs performance that you want, e.g. decode_config_slice decodes into an existing &mut [u8] and is pretty fast (2.6GiB/s for a 3 KiB input), whereas decode_config allocates a new Vec<u8> and returns it, which might be more convenient in some cases, but is slower (although still fast enough for almost any purpose) at 2.1 GiB/s.

Example

extern crate base64;

use base64::{encode, decode};

fn main() {
    let a = b"hello world";
    let b = "aGVsbG8gd29ybGQ=";

    assert_eq!(encode(a), b);
    assert_eq!(a, &decode(b).unwrap()[..]);
}

See the docs for all the details.

Rust version compatibility

The minimum required Rust version is 1.36.0.

Contributing

Contributions are very welcome. However, because this library is used widely, and in security-sensitive contexts, all PRs will be carefully scrutinized. Beyond that, this sort of low level library simply needs to be 100% correct. Nobody wants to chase bugs in encoding of any sort.

All this means that it takes me a fair amount of time to review each PR, so it might take quite a while to carve out the free time to give each PR the attention it deserves. I will get to everyone eventually!

Developing

Benchmarks are in benches/. Running them requires nightly rust, but rustup makes it easy:

rustup run nightly cargo bench

Decoding is aided by some pre-calculated tables, which are generated by:

cargo run --example make_tables > src/tables.rs.tmp && mv src/tables.rs.tmp src/tables.rs

no_std

This crate supports no_std. By default the crate targets std via the std feature. You can deactivate the default-features to target core instead. In that case you lose out on all the functionality revolving around std::io, std::error::Error and heap allocations. There is an additional alloc feature that you can activate to bring back the support for heap allocations.

Profiling

On Linux, you can use perf for profiling. Then compile the benchmarks with rustup nightly run cargo bench --no-run.

Run the benchmark binary with perf (shown here filtering to one particular benchmark, which will make the results easier to read). perf is only available to the root user on most systems as it fiddles with event counters in your CPU, so use sudo. We need to run the actual benchmark binary, hence the path into target. You can see the actual full path with rustup run nightly cargo bench -v; it will print out the commands it runs. If you use the exact path that bench outputs, make sure you get the one that's for the benchmarks, not the tests. You may also want to cargo clean so you have only one benchmarks- binary (they tend to accumulate).

sudo perf record target/release/deps/benchmarks-* --bench decode_10mib_reuse

Then analyze the results, again with perf:

sudo perf annotate -l

You'll see a bunch of interleaved rust source and assembly like this. The section with lib.rs:327 is telling us that 4.02% of samples saw the movzbl aka bit shift as the active instruction. However, this percentage is not as exact as it seems due to a phenomenon called skid. Basically, a consequence of how fancy modern CPUs are is that this sort of instruction profiling is inherently inaccurate, especially in branch-heavy code.

 lib.rs:322    0.70 :     10698:       mov    %rdi,%rax
    2.82 :        1069b:       shr    $0x38,%rax
         :                  if morsel == decode_tables::INVALID_VALUE {
         :                      bad_byte_index = input_index;
         :                      break;
         :                  };
         :                  accum = (morsel as u64) << 58;
 lib.rs:327    4.02 :     1069f:       movzbl (%r9,%rax,1),%r15d
         :              // fast loop of 8 bytes at a time
         :              while input_index < length_of_full_chunks {
         :                  let mut accum: u64;
         :
         :                  let input_chunk = BigEndian::read_u64(&input_bytes[input_index..(input_index + 8)]);
         :                  morsel = decode_table[(input_chunk >> 56) as usize];
 lib.rs:322    3.68 :     106a4:       cmp    $0xff,%r15
         :                  if morsel == decode_tables::INVALID_VALUE {
    0.00 :        106ab:       je     1090e <base64::decode_config_buf::hbf68a45fefa299c1+0x46e>

Fuzzing

This uses cargo-fuzz. See fuzz/fuzzers for the available fuzzing scripts. To run, use an invocation like these:

cargo +nightly fuzz run roundtrip
cargo +nightly fuzz run roundtrip_no_pad
cargo +nightly fuzz run roundtrip_random_config -- -max_len=10240
cargo +nightly fuzz run decode_random

License

This project is dual-licensed under MIT and Apache 2.0.