Oxidelta

High-performance VCDIFF (RFC 3284) delta encoding/decoding in Rust.

oxidelta targets interoperability with xdelta3 at the file format level, while providing a Rust-native library API and an idiomatic CLI.

Quick Start

Install

cargo install --locked oxidelta

Alternative (prebuilt binary, faster install):

cargo binstall oxidelta

Manual binary install:

1. Download your platform archive from GitHub Releases.
2. Extract it and place oxidelta on your PATH.

Package manager note:

• Homebrew/Scoop/apt/rpm distribution is supported by the release pipeline artifacts.
• If you maintain internal package repos, consume release tarballs and checksums from releases.

Encode

oxidelta encode --source old.bin new.bin patch.vcdiff

Decode

oxidelta decode --source old.bin patch.vcdiff restored.bin

Inspect a patch

oxidelta header patch.vcdiff
oxidelta headers patch.vcdiff
oxidelta delta patch.vcdiff

CLI Highlights

• Subcommand-first CLI: encode, decode, config, header, headers, delta, recode, merge
• Tunables:
  • --level 0..9
  • --window-size
  • --source-window-size
  • --duplicate-window-size
  • --instruction-buffer-size
  • --secondary {none,lzma,zlib,djw,fgk}
• Output controls:
  • --stdout
  • --check-only
  • --json
  • global --force, --quiet, --verbose

Library Usage

use oxidelta::compress::encoder::{self, CompressOptions};
use oxidelta::compress::decoder;

fn main() {
    let source = b"hello old world";
    let target = b"hello new world";

    let mut delta = Vec::new();
    encoder::encode_all(&mut delta, source, target, CompressOptions::default()).unwrap();

    let decoded = decoder::decode_all(source, &delta).unwrap();
    assert_eq!(decoded, target);
}

More examples:

• examples/basic_encode_decode.rs
• examples/library_usage.rs
• examples/custom_backend.rs
• examples/integration_pipeline.rs

Documentation

• Architecture: ARCHITECTURE.md
• Performance and benchmark methodology: PERFORMANCE.md
• Compatibility matrix and differences: COMPATIBILITY.md
• Migration guide from xdelta CLI workflows: MIGRATION.md

API docs:

cargo doc --all-features --no-deps --open

Hosted docs are intended at: https://docs.rs/oxidelta

Release and Binaries

Automated release pipelines build and publish binaries for:

• Linux: x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu, aarch64-unknown-linux-gnu
• macOS: x86_64-apple-darwin, aarch64-apple-darwin
• Windows: x86_64-pc-windows-msvc, aarch64-pc-windows-msvc

See .github/workflows/release.yml for details.

For crates.io publishing, configure repository secret CARGO_REGISTRY_TOKEN (an API token with publish permissions).

Status

Production hardening is ongoing. The project is already heavily tested (unit, integration, property tests, cross-interop tests against xdelta3), and release/benchmark workflows are in place.