Wire Compatibility

svb is wire-compatible with the reference C implementations and the streamvbyte64 Rust crate. This means a buffer encoded by svb can be decoded by the C library and vice versa.

Compatibility table

Buffer layout difference

streamvbyte64 keeps tags and data in separate buffers. svb concatenates them (tags first). When exchanging data with streamvbyte64, split or join buffers at the control stream boundary:

#![allow(unused)]
fn main() {
// svb flat → streamvbyte64 separate buffers
fn split_flat(encoded: &[u8], n: usize) -> (&[u8], &[u8]) {
    let ctrl_len = n.div_ceil(4);
    (&encoded[..ctrl_len], &encoded[ctrl_len..])
}

// streamvbyte64 separate buffers → svb flat
fn join_flat(tags: &[u8], data: &[u8]) -> Vec<u8> {
    let mut flat = tags.to_vec();
    flat.extend_from_slice(data);
    flat
}
}

Verification

Wire compatibility is verified in tests/compat.rs by round-tripping data in both directions: svb encodes and streamvbyte64 decodes, then streamvbyte64 encodes and svb decodes. These tests run in CI for all four compatible codec pairs.