Alright, I think I have it working pretty well, now! My arbitrary length positive integer codec for arbitrary ascii encoding is "finished"!

I can convert numeric (dec, bin, ter, quad, etc.), alphabetical, alphanumeric (case sensitive and non-sensitive, like hex, bech32, base58), other non-alphanumeric like base64 (includes a '+' and a '/'), and any arbitrary encoding that can be expressed as a non-repeating sequence of characters (can be expressed as a Vec) from values 0 to 255 or fewer.

I took a base64 integer of length 8161 digits (the max length the command line would allow me to enter) and converted to alphabetical, hex, and decimal, and it only took a couple seconds.

There are a few optimizations I could make, like checking for bases of powers of two and using shifts rather than multiplications and divides, doing more bulk operations of the Vec, and going up from Vec to Vec to reduce the number of operations, but still, it works!

I think I might also be able to create a few new large-integer types that would act like u256, u512, u2048, etc., using arrays rather than vectors, and that might unlock more optimizations. However, this was only a challenge I gave myself so I could learn Rust, so I might not so I can move on to learn more and start on other projects.

What do I do with it now?

#learnRust #rust #ask Nostr