protozoa/wire

Protocol Buffer Wire Format Module

This module defines the low-level wire format types and utilities for Protocol Buffer binary encoding and decoding. It provides the foundational types and functions needed to work with the Protocol Buffer binary wire format specification.

Wire Format Fundamentals

Protocol Buffers use a binary wire format for efficient serialization. Each field is encoded with a specific wire type that determines how the data is represented:

• Varint: Variable-length integers (most integers, bools, enums)
• Fixed64: 8-byte fixed-width values (double, fixed64, sfixed64)
• LengthDelimited: Length-prefixed data (strings, bytes, messages, maps)
• Fixed32: 4-byte fixed-width values (float, fixed32, sfixed32)
• StartGroup/EndGroup: Deprecated group encoding (proto2 only)

Capabilities

• Wire type definitions: Complete enumeration of Protocol Buffer wire types
• Tag manipulation: Functions for creating and parsing field tags
• Format validation: Utilities for validating wire format data
• Type safety: Compile-time guarantees about wire format correctness

Usage in Protozoa

This module is primarily used by the encode and decode modules to:

• Determine the correct wire type for each field type
• Create properly formatted field tags
• Parse field numbers and wire types from binary data
• Validate wire format compliance

Public API

The main public component is the WireType type which is used throughout the encode/decode pipeline. Internal utility functions are marked with @internal as they are implementation details.

pub type WireType {
  Varint
  Fixed64
  LengthDelimited
  StartGroup
  EndGroup
  Fixed32
}