Streams preserving strict wire-compatibility with unsecured or TLS-secured TCPĬonnections. Atop these extensions, Minion buildsĪpplication-level protocols offering true unordered datagram delivery, within Small OS API extensions allow applications to manage TCP's send bufferĪnd to receive TCP segments out-of-order. Minion, an architecture for backward-compatible out-of-order delivery atop TCPĪnd TLS. Internet evolution makes TCP's use as a substrate likely to grow, we offer In-order semantics from a convenience blessing to a performance curse. Internet applications increasingly employ TCP not as a stream abstraction,īut as a substrate for application-level transports, a use that converts TCP's

Experiments suggest that Minion can noticeably improve performance of applications such as conferencing, virtual private networking, and web browsing, while incurring minimal CPU or bandwidth costs. Minion's protocols can run on unmodified TCP stacks, but benefit incrementally when either endpoint is upgraded, for a backward-compatible deployment path. Atop these extensions, Minion builds application-level protocols offering true unordered datagram delivery, within streams preserving strict wire-compatibility with unsecured or TLS-secured TCP connections. Small OS API extensions allow applications to manage TCP's send buffer and to receive TCP segments out-of-order. As Internet evolution makes TCP's use as a substrate likely to grow, we offer Minion, an architecture for backward-compatible out-of-order delivery atop TCP and TLS. Note that the secrets stdlib module also gives you convenience functions that does this conversion for you.Internet applications increasingly employ TCP not as a stream abstraction, but as a substrate for application-level transports, a use that converts TCP's in-order semantics from a convenience blessing to a performance curse.

it will use the least amount of extra bytes. Hex has the advantage that the size of the resulting string is always 2 * n_bytes, while base64 is the most efficient way of encoding bytes into ASCII, i.e. For example, you can encode it as hex characters or in base64. If you want to represent such a sequence as a string, it's possible to encode it into a sequence of bytes that are all inside the ASCII encoding space, but of course, at the cost of using more bytes. See for example secrets.token_bytes from the stdlib. This is because you want to work with as large as possible an output space when generating pseudo-random numbers and sequences. One example of when you might need to use bytes, is when working with crypto and pseudo-random sequence generation, where you will often end up with a sequence of bytes that cannot be represented 1-to-1 as a string. So anytime you have a sequence of bytes that is not representable as a string, you have to use bytes() or bytearray. With UTF-8 it gets a little more complicated, but you end up in a similar problem, that not all byte sequences are representable as a string. In the ASCII character encoding, there are only 128 different values, with only a subset of those being printable. For all modern computer architectures, a byte consists of 8 bits and thus can encode 256 distinct values.

Advantages of byte styuffing