A library for Reed-Solomon GF(2^16) erasure coding, featuring:

• O(n log n) complexity.
• Any combination of 1 - 32768 original shards with 1 - 32768 recovery shards.
• Up to 65535 original or recovery shards with some limitations.
• SIMD optimizations are planned, but not yet implemented.

1. Divide data into equal-sized original shards. Shard size must be multiple of 64 bytes.
2. Decide how many recovery shards you want.
3. Generate recovery shards with reed_solomon_16::encode.
4. When some original shards get lost, restore them with reed_solomon_16::decode.
   • You must provide at least as many shards as there were original shards in total, in any combination of original shards and recovery shards.

Divide data into 3 original shards of 64 bytes each and generate 5 recovery shards. Assume then that original shards #0 and #2 are lost and restore them by providing 1 original shard and 2 recovery shards.

let original = [
    b"Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do ",
    b"eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut e",
    b"nim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris n",
];

let recovery = reed_solomon_16::encode(
    3, // total number of original shards
    5, // total number of recovery shards
    original, // all original shards
)?;

let restored = reed_solomon_16::decode(
    3, // total number of original shards
    5, // total number of recovery shards
    [  // provided original shards with indexes
        (1, &original[1]),
    ],
    [  // provided recovery shards with indexes
        (1, &recovery[1]),
        (4, &recovery[4]),
    ],
)?;

assert_eq!(restored[&0], original[0]);
assert_eq!(restored[&2], original[2]);
# Ok::<(), reed_solomon_16::Error>(())

ReedSolomonEncoder and ReedSolomonDecoder give more control of the encoding/decoding process.

Here's the above example using these instead:

use reed_solomon_16::{ReedSolomonDecoder, ReedSolomonEncoder};
use std::collections::HashMap;

let original = [
    b"Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do ",
    b"eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut e",
    b"nim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris n",
];

let mut encoder = ReedSolomonEncoder::new(
    3, // total number of original shards
    5, // total number of recovery shards
    64, // shard size in bytes
)?;

for original in original {
    encoder.add_original_shard(original)?;
}

let result = encoder.encode()?;
let recovery: Vec<_> = result.recovery_iter().collect();

let mut decoder = ReedSolomonDecoder::new(
    3, // total number of original shards
    5, // total number of recovery shards
    64, // shard size in bytes
)?;

decoder.add_original_shard(1, original[1])?;
decoder.add_recovery_shard(1, recovery[1])?;
decoder.add_recovery_shard(4, recovery[4])?;

let result = decoder.decode()?;
let restored: HashMap<_, _> = result.restored_original_iter().collect();

assert_eq!(restored[&0], original[0]);
assert_eq!(restored[&2], original[2]);
# Ok::<(), reed_solomon_16::Error>(())

See rate module for advanced encoding/decoding using chosen Engine and Rate.

• These benchmarks are from cargo bench main with 3.4 GHz i5-3570K (Ivy Bridge, 3rd gen.).
• Shards are 1024 bytes.
• MiB/s is total amount of data, i.e. original shards + recovery shards.
  • For decoder this includes missing shards.
• Encode benchmark
  • Includes add_original_shard and encode of ReedSolomonEncoder.
• Decode benchmark
  • Has two MiB/s values for 1% and 100% original shard loss, of maximum possible.
  • Provides minimum required amount of shards to decoder.
  • Includes add_original_shard, add_recovery_shard and decode of ReedSolomonDecoder.

Use cargo run --release --example quick-comparison to run few simple benchmarks against reed-solomon-erasure and reed-solomon-novelpoly crates.

This crate is fastest when shard count exceeds 256 shards, except for one-time initialization (< 10 ms) which can dominate at really small data amounts.

Some larger tests are marked #[ignore] and are not run with cargo test. Use cargo test -- --ignored to run those.

This crate doesn't currently use any unsafe code.

However planned SIMD-optimized engines will need to use unsafe, but the intention is that nothing else will use unsafe.

This crate is based on Leopard-RS by Christopher A. Taylor.