This Library is still pre-0.1.0 the API is therefore in heavy flux, and everything should be considered alpha!

A small library for conveniently working with immutables bytes from different sources, providing zero-copy slicing and cloning.

Access itself is extremely cheap via no-op conversion to a &[u8].

The storage mechanism backing the bytes can be extended and is implemented for a variety of sources already, including other byte handling crates Bytes, mmap-ed files, Strings and Zerocopy types.

Comparison

Crate	Active	Extensible	mmap support	Zerocopy Integration	Pyo3 Integration	kani verified
anybytes	✅	✅	✅	✅	✅	🚧
bytes	✅	✅	✅1	❌	❌	❌
ownedbytes	✅	✅	✅	❌	❌	❌
minibytes	✅2	✅	✅	❌	❌	❌

Acknowledgements

This library started as a fork of the minibyte library in facebooks sapling scm.

Thanks to @kylebarron for his feedback and ideas on Pyo3 integration.

Footnotes

1. Recently added a new "Owned Bytes" variant, which still has all the downsides of a V-Table. ↩

2. Recently published again. ↩