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Nullus157 / bs58-rs

Another Rust Base58 codec implementation
Apache License 2.0
77 stars 24 forks source link

Consider simplifying the API #78

Closed matklad closed 3 years ago

matklad commented 3 years ago

As a new user of base58, I need to understand how it works and how to use it. The current setup with EncodeBuilder struct and EncodeTarget is not trivial -- it took me some time to wrap my head around the crate's API. I suggest taking inspiration from base64 API:

https://docs.rs/base64/0.13.0/base64/index.html#functions

it is based around functions and is much easier for me presonaly to understand.

Nemo157 commented 3 years ago

To support the same set of choices would take 24 functions for encoding (default/custom alphabet no check byte/check byte/check byte and version 4 output types); or probably 6 or 7 encoding functions (base64 is missing functions for writing to an existing Vec<u8> or &mut str) + passing a config struct around like base64 does, which is essentially just an inverted builder pattern and I find more annoying to read than a fluent API.

I realize the API isn't the simplest, but that's why I went example heavy showing pretty much every variation, it shouldn't really be necessary to understand EncodeTarget to use it.

matklad commented 3 years ago

That's fair!

it shouldn't really be necessary to understand EncodeTarget to use it.

That depends on the user: I have a quirk where I basically always ignore the docs for a crate and go directly to source code instead.

I guess, I am still pretty confident that base64-style API is possible (they have config, and the set of functions they provide (+ read/write/display modules) covers all necessary use-cases, if not all possible use-cases) and would work for me personally better, but I see how other people might have a difference design preference!