rust-base64 VS ucd-generate

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.

So you're saying that the 'expect()' message when a regex compilation error occurs should be a translation from a terse domain specific language to bloviating prose? :-)

What 'expect()' message would you write for this regex? https://github.com/BurntSushi/ucd-generate/blob/6d3aae3b8005...

I think 'unwrap()' there is perfectly appropriate.

> I think it'd be desirable to have a `.unwrap_with_context("Context: {}")`, and the you'd get `Context: Inner Panic Info`.

Why?

I've also embedded Unicode tables a number of times. It's very easy to do, and I do it enough that I even have a tool to do it. Having tooling and scripts to do it is important for reasons of provenance and also for when the tables need to be updated (every year or so).

ucd-generate for generating Unicode tables. It is what the regex crate uses to generate all of its tables, and it supports many properties already. It also provides a way to represent Unicode character names in a compressed data structure.