bva

bva is a rust crate for manipulating and doing arithmetics on bit vectors of fixed but arbitrary size. They are meant to behave like CPU hardware registers with wrap-around on overflow.

This crate emphasizes optimizing storage by providing alternative storage options. The module fixed contains implementations using arrays of unsigned integers as storage and thus have a fixed capacity. The module dynamic contains an implementation using a dynamically allocated array of integers as storage and therefore has a dynamic capacity. The module auto contains an implementation capable of switching at runtime between a fixed or dynamic capacity implementation to try to minimize dynamic memory allocations. All of those implementations implement the BitVector trait and can be freely mixed together and used interchangeably via generic traits.

Changelog

• 2024/07/07 - 0.3.0
  • Multiplication, division and modulo operations
  • Various helper functions
  • Much more rigorous testing reaching high code coverage.
• 2023/07/04 - 0.2.0
  • Major rewrite using const generics
  • Iterator support
• 2020/12/20 - 0.1.0
  • BitVector trait with fixed, dynamic and auto implementations.
  • Conversion between all the implementations
  • Basic arithmetic operations between the different implementations.
  • Reading and writing bit vector in various format.

Roadmap

• Aiming for 100% code coverage.
• Signed operation support.
• Borrowing of bits and bit slice inside a bit vector.
• Numerical algorithms such as gcd, modular exponentiation, ...
• no-std support

Why

None of the existing crate really satisfied me and I wanted an implementation capable of minimizing dynamic memory allocations by automatically switching to fixed storage. I also wanted a crate that was capable of doing arithmetics on arbitrarily sized bit vectors, not just powers of two. Also it was great practice for my rust macro writing skills.