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+// Copyright 2015 The Chromium Authors. All rights reserved. |
+// Use of this source code is governed by a BSD-style license that can be |
+// found in the LICENSE file. |
+ |
+// Package cmpbin provides binary serialization routines which ensure that the |
+// serialized objects maintain the same sort order of the original inputs when |
+// sorted bytewise (i.e. with memcmp). Additionally, serialized objects are |
+// concatenatable. |
+// |
+// Notes on particular serialization schemes: |
+// |
+// - Numbers: |
+// The number encoding is less efficient on average than Varint |
+// ("encoding/binary") for small numbers (it has a minimum encoded size of |
+// 2 bytes), but is more efficient for large numbers (it has a maximum encoded |
+// size of 9 bytes for a 64 bit int, unlike the largest Varint which has a 10b |
+// representation). |
+// |
+// Both signed and unsigned numbers are encoded with the same scheme, and will |
+// sort together as signed numbers. Decoding with the incorrect routine will |
+// result in an ErrOverflow/ErrUnderflow error if the actual value is out of |
+// range. |
+// |
+// The scheme works like: |
+// - given an 2's compliment value V |
+// - extract the sign (S) and magnitude (M) of V |
+// - Find the position of the highest bit (P), minus 1. |
+// - write (bits): |
+// - SPPPPPPP MMMMMMMM MM000000 |
+// - S is 1 |
+// - P's are the log2(M)-1 |
+// - M's are the magnitude of V |
+// - 0's are padding |
+// - Additionally, if the number is negative, invert the bits of all the bytes |
+// (e.g. XOR 0xFF). This makes the sign bit S 0 for negative numbers, and |
+// makes the ordering of the numbers correct when compared bytewise. |
+// |
+// - Strings/[]byte |
+// Each byte in the encoded stream reserves the least significant bit as a stop |
+// bit (1 means that the string continues, 0 means that the string ends). The |
+// actual user data is shifted into the top 7 bits of every encoded byte. This |
+// results in a data inflation rate of 12.5%, but this overhead is constant |
+// (doesn't vary by the encoded content). Note that if space efficiency is very |
+// important and you are storing large strings on average, you could reduce the |
+// overhead by only placing the stop bit on every other byte or every 4th byte, |
+// etc. This would reduce the overhead to 6.25% or 3.125% accordingly (but would |
+// cause every string to round out to 2 or 4 byte chunks), and it would make |
+// the algorithm implementation more complex. The current implementation was |
+// chosen as good enough in light of the fact that pre-compressing regular data |
+// could save more than 12.5% overall, and that for incompressable data a |
+// commonly used encoding scheme (base64) has a full 25% overhead (and a |
+// generally more complex implementation). |
+// |
+// - Floats |
+// Floats are tricky (really tricky) because they have lots of weird |
+// non-sortable special cases (like NaN). That said, for the majority of |
+// non-weird cases, the implementation here will sort real numbers the way that |
+// you would expect. |
+// |
+// The implementation is derived from http://stereopsis.com/radix.html, and full |
+// credit for the original algorithm goes to Michael Herf. The algorithm is |
+// essentially: |
+// |
+// - if the number is positive, flip the top bit |
+// - if the number is negative, flip all the bits |
+// |
+// Floats are not varint encoded, you could varint encode the mantissa |
+// (significand). This is only a 52 bit section, meaning that it is normally |
+// encoded with 6.5 bytes (a nybble is stolen from the second exponent byte). |
+// Assuming you used the numerical encoding above, shifted left by 4 bits, |
+// discarding the sign bit (since its laready the MSb on the float, and then |
+// using 6 bits (instead of 7) to represent the number of significant bits in |
+// the mantissa (since there are only a maximum of 52), you could expect to see |
+// small-mantissa floats (of any characteristic) encoded in 3 bytes (this has |
+// 6 bits of mantissa), and the largest floats would have an encoded size of |
+// 9 bytes (with 2 wasted bits). However the implementation complexity would be |
+// higher. |
+// |
+// The actual encoded values for special cases are (sorted high to low): |
+// - QNaN - 0xFFF8000000000000 |
+// // note that golang doesn't seem to actually have SNaN? |
+// - SNaN - 0xFFF0000000000001 |
+// - +inf - 0xFFF0000000000000 |
+// - MaxFloat64 - 0xFFEFFFFFFFFFFFFF |
+// - SmallestNonzeroFloat64 - 0x8000000000000001 |
+// - 0 - 0x8000000000000000 |
+// - -0 - 0x7FFFFFFFFFFFFFFF |
+// - -SmallestNonzeroFloat64 - 0x7FFFFFFFFFFFFFFE |
+// - -MaxFloat64 - 0x0010000000000000 |
+// - -inf - 0x000FFFFFFFFFFFFF |
+package cmpbin |