io-arrays

Think of an I/O array as a Vec<u8> which lives outside the program. You can index into it and copy data in and out. You can append to it or shrink it from the back.

In I/O terms, an I/O array is an abstraction of a "file". It supports doing I/O at arbitrary offsets, appending, and truncating. You can read from it in a streaming fashion using [ReadAt::read_via_stream_at].

TODO: Writing to an array in a streaming fashion is not yet supported.

This crate defines [ReadAt], [WriteAt], and [EditAt] traits which define interfaces to random-access or seekable devices, such as normal files, block devices, disk partitions, and memory buffers.

It also defines [ArrayReader], [ArrayWriter], and [ArrayEditor] types which implement the above traits and and can be constructed from any file-like type. On Posix-ish platforms, with support for WASI in development, these types just contain a single file descriptor (and implement [AsRawFd]), plus any resources needed to safely hold the file descriptor live. On Windows, they contain a single file handle (and implement [AsRawHandle]).