Byte Loaf 🍞

What

This library lets one treat a heap-allocated byte buffer as a loaf of bread 🍞; its contents can be arbitrarily partitioned into slices, which can be passed around, accessed, and owned independently.

Concretely, a single-part loaf can be created, and treated as a mutable byte buffer as usual. ```rust let x = LoafPart::new(5); let slice = x.asslicemut();

slice.writeall(b"hello").unwrap(); asserteq!(slice, b"hello");

slice[3] = b'Q'; assert_eq!(slice, b"helQo"); ```

Ownership of the loaf's bytes can be further sub-divided by splitting existing parts. rust let y = x.split_at(3); assert_eq!(x.as_slice(), b"hel" ); assert_eq!(y.as_slice(), b"lo");

For parts owning contiguous bytes, their sub-division of ownership can be re-drawn, or joined into one part. rust x.with_try_resplit_at(y, 0..4).unwrap(); assert_eq!(x.as_slice(), b"hell" ); assert_eq!(y.as_slice(), b"o"); let z = x.with_try_join(y).unwrap(); assert_eq!(z.as_slice(), b"hello");

Why

This library was created as a utility for storing independently-owned byte slices, while minimizing the number of heap allocations. For example, this is useful for hanging onto the contents of sent UDP datagrams until their receipt is acknowledged later.