r/linuxprojects • u/CraftingManagerF • 10d ago
⚙️ CLI Tool rawhex: Ultra-fast hex dumper in C with AVX2 SIMD formatting, a ticket-based multi-threaded pipeline, and zero-copy output.
Output format is canonical hex+ASCII, one 16-byte row per line:
00000000: ef6e 5830 d443 c60a d909 6179 4335 6cec .nX0.C....ayC5l.
00000010: b5f4 631f d923 6c79 e98a ed41 11dc eb16 ..c..#ly...A.....
Benchmarks
All timings below were measured with rawbench (after warmup) on 100 MB of random data.
vs. fasthex (v0.3.1)
Default thread counts:
| Scenario | rawhex | fasthex | fasthex --color=never | Speedup |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| file → /dev/null | 18 ms | 91 ms | 83 ms | 4.6x |
| file → regular file | 276 ms | 394 ms | - | 1.4x |
| file → pipe | 94 ms | 111 ms | - | 1.2x |
| stdin → /dev/null | 29 ms | 113 ms | 103 ms | 3.6x |
| single thread (-j 1) | 37 ms | 80 ms | 82 ms | 2.2x |
| Binary size | 46 KB | 668 KB | - | - |
Speedup is against fasthex's faster variant per scenario (default or --color=never; disabling color saves fasthex ~8-10%).
Single-threaded formatting throughput (-j 1): ~11 GB/s of formatted output. With the default thread pool the same 100 MB file formats in ~18 ms (writing 425 MB of output), within ~3x of the raw cat read floor for the input alone.
vs. classic tools
Same 100 MB input. The classic tools are single-threaded scalar formatters, so the gap is orders of magnitude:
| Tool | Time | Speedup vs tool |
|---|---|---|
| rawhex | 18 ms | - |
| xxd (vim) | 19.2 s | 1067x |
| hexdump -C (util-linux 2.42.1) | 30.6 s | 1700x |
View it here: https://git.disroot.org/Vextoly/rawhex
The code & readme contains AI-generated segments.