itoa VS rust-base64

The hyper package for the crab language actually has a dependency on a package that does itoa (among others) so IMO the problem exist there too and most non trivial packages will be bloated

I see itoa which seems trivial on the surface. The implementation is highly optimized, but it's also covering all the different cases. I'm guessing this is for printing match counts or line numbers, and if this is actually a bottleneck for ripgrep — which seems unlikely — then maybe it's worth it. You know your own needs, and if it was a bottleneck, I bet you could do just as well, if not better, with a custom, smaller, simpler solution inside ripgrep. (i.e. just make sure the power-of-ten denominators are available at compile time so the compiler won't generate divisions.)

It would be interesting to compare your implementation and the most popular implementation for Rust+base64: https://github.com/marshallpierce/rust-base64

I am writing a CLI util in rust that utilizes xml-rpc-rs to talk to an rtorrent server and I would like to be able to add torrent files. OK according to the python implementation, which some of the rtorrent developers have said is good, of xmlrpc-client it uses this base64 format: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc2045.html#section-6.8 I base64 encode /some/file/foo.torrent and send it up. OK!

Funny that you claim base64 forbids unsafe code while linking a PR where the current maintainer of the crate explicitly agrees that unsafe for the purpose of SIMD-acceleration is a-okay. Did you by any chance meant to link https://github.com/marshallpierce/rust-base64/pull/114 instead? ;)

> It does need to be in the standard library

When I say that something “has to be in the standard library”, I mean that it can’t be implemented outside the standard library. That’s certainly not the case here. You’re using an outright bad definition of “need” here—subjective opinion rather than objective requirement.

> because everyone needs it

This is factually wildly wrong. I wrote a fair bit more here but decided it wasn’t helpful. Précis: web stuff tends to load it indirectly (though amusingly most of the time actually not use it, so that Base64 code won’t actually end up in your binary), but it’s not terribly common outside of internet stuff to reach for Base64.

I’ll leave just one more remark about Base64: once things are in the standard library, breaking changes can no longer be made; the base64 crate is still experiencing breaking changes (<https://github.com/marshallpierce/rust-base64/blob/master/RE...>, 0.12 and 0.13 were last year and 0.20 is not released), largely for performance reasons.

Please don’t just call the thin-std approach “problematic” without acknowledging that the alternative is at least as problematic, just with a different set of caveats.

Many of these have their own tracking issues on the path to v1.0. For example see this one for base64.

I see base64. If the standard library has base64 encoding, go ahead and use it. But as a third-party dependency? Again, base64 encoding and decoding is trivial. I've written this a few times myself. It's not worth a dependency.