Design goal of the Content storage/serialization backend.
When implementing Content for your type, you need to provide only two methods, to_content that takes a Read, and produces a Self, and from_content, an example for u8:
rust
impl Content for u8 {
fn to_content(&self, sink: &mut Sink) -> Result<()> {
sink.write_all(&[*self])
}
fn from_content(source: &mut Source) -> Result<Self> {
let b = &mut [0u8];
try!(source.read_exact(b));
Ok(b[0])
}
}
Backend traitThe backend trait makes a type act as as storage for content addressed bytestreams, be it Vec<u8> or File. But it could also be a network interface, for example.
Things that implement Content, implicitly know how to serialize and deserialize themselves, including knowing their length. And since types can nest other Content types within themselves, you basically get the whole schema and de/serialization for free.
When a Content is put into a store, Reads and Writes are connected directly.