Rename funnybase and add more serializations.

common/cmpbin/doc.go

Index: common/cmpbin/doc.go
diff --git a/common/cmpbin/doc.go b/common/cmpbin/doc.go
new file mode 100644
index 0000000000000000000000000000000000000000..6785f8d1332cfa415df70bebc796ee8272f77fc9
--- /dev/null
+++ b/common/cmpbin/doc.go
@@ -0,0 +1,91 @@
+// 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

[M-A Ruel, 2015/07/06 23:21:35]

I prefer - to * for lists (not a big deal, since it's not markdown anyway).

In fact, I'm not sure this will render well (?)

[iannucci, 2015/07/07 00:03:27]

It's considered an indented block (so it's <pre>...</pre>). It currently looks
good in both plaintext and html. I'll switch to - though.

+//   * 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