HdrHistogram / HdrHistogram/HdrHistogram_rust

Consider allowing serialization into a Vec<u8> directly

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Dominant language
Rust
Stars
372
Forks
50
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No merged PRs in 30d

Description

Currently, serialization output is directed to a Write in both the V2 and V2 + DEFLATE serializers. This is a very flexible abstraction, but the serialization formats dictate a length prefix, which means that output must be buffered before writing to the writer so that we can drop in the final length in the appropriate spot.

This buffering is especially sad in the DEFLATE case, since we already have a Vec<u8> that will hold the uncompressed serialization, but we can only expose it to the underlying V2 serializer as a Write, so the uncompressed bytes get written to V2's buffer, then copied into V2 + DEFLATE's buffer, then compressed into another buffer, then written to the user-provided writer.

Some options:

  • Functions for Write or Vec<u8>, where the former buffers into an internal Vec<u8>
  • Functions for Write or Write + Seek. Need to benchmark this to see if it's measurably different from the Vec<u8> case. If it isn't, this seems preferable as it is more general.
  • Give up on Write and only serialize into either Write + Seek or a Vec<u8>. Maybe supporting I/O streams that don't seek is a sufficiently niche case that it's not worth creating an easy path for? On one hand, I really want to encourage people to use these formats as a wire protocol in a monitoring system. On the other hand, maybe such a protocol would use a container format like protobuf around the serialized histogram anyway, and it's a waste of API complexity budget to support simple Write usage.

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Research direction

Start by comparing the V2 and V2 + DEFLATE serializers and tracing how their Write-based output is buffered. Benchmark the proposed Vec and Write + Seek approaches, then clarify which API design is preferred and what serialization behavior should be considered complete.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Assessment

Tech stack
rust
Domain
backend-api-design
Issue type
Feature
Difficulty
5/5
Estimated time
Over a week
Activity status
Stale
Clarity
Needs clarification
Newbie friendliness
25/100

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