Show: bitintr - Portable bitwise manipulation intrinsics

bitintr is the first library that I have publish to crates.io. It offers bitwise manipulation intrinsics for platform specific instructions. It works on stable, but when its compiled with a nightly compiler it uses compiler hooks for some of the intrinsics.

Any feedback and contributions are welcome! :slight_smile:

I am using it in my bitwise crate, which provides high-level bitwise manipulation algorithms that work on words and sequences (I hope I can publish a first version of bitwise soon).

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It's always nice if you could characterize your crate in terms of any others with similar functionality out there? Totally different? Similar to X, but different goal/requirement? Etc.

And nice addition to the ecosystem. Thanks :slight_smile:

The main difference is that it actually uses unstable compiler hooks on nightly (automatically) for some of the intrinsics (AFAIK no other library does that yet) while providing a software fallback if the target doesn't support the instruction (AFAIK no other library does this either).

The rest of the differences are not really that important. It provides ~95% of the advanced bit manipulation intrinsics on x86 (which are a lot) and the most important advanced bit manipulation intrinsics on ARM (AFAIK no other library covers as many instructions as this one).

Production-wise I use it in my other library (bitwise) and both are in the 2-3rd iteration API-wise. As I finish bitwise the API of bitintr might changem, but right now I am at least confident enough to showcase the library and ask for external feedback on the design. It is still in 0.1.z state so... time will tell. It solves a single problem, and I hope it solves it well.

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