zig-bloom 0.0.7

Bloom filter implemented in zig

bloom-zig

Bloom filters written in Zig with Python bindings.

NOTE that this software is under development and it's not completely functional!

How to install

Right now, there's only a wheel for Macos. To install it, you can run the usual

pip install bloom-zig

If you need to install this package for another architecture, refer to the section about building from source.

Building from source

To build this package from source, you'll need:

• Zig (version 0.11.0)
• Python (version used is 3.9, but it should work with lower versions)
• Python development header
• make (not mandatory, but handy)

If everything correctly installed, you can run zig build test to double check that everything works.

Then, go inside code_binding directory. You can create a Python env with the requirements.txt installed or install the requirements in your current env. With everything in place, run

make install

This should install the bloom package in your environment. To test that the package has been correctly installed, run make test.

How it works

The src folder contains the Zig code for the Bloom filter. It internally uses an ArrayList of u32, where each bit in a u32 element represents an element in the set. I'd preferred to use a more efficient structure or directly an array of u64, but I'm not aware of the compile-time functionality of Zig and if they integrate well with Python code. So I decided to stick with the basics.

The code_binding folder contains the code used to generate the Python wheel package and the Python bindings directly written in Zig. There's a Makefile to reproduce the building steps. The Zig code is a blind translation of the C code for writing Python bindings.

The exposed functionalities inside Python are a class called BloomFilter with 3 methods: add, present and count. There's also a function called fnv to compute a 64 bit non-cryptographic hash.

Why?

Never written an extension for Python so far. Just a beginner with Zig. How to conciliate these two aspects? A Python extension in Zig! The great interop that Zig has with C libraries made the process (not-so-much) simple.

TODOs

• make wheels for manylinux
• Pypi package(s)
• examples and benchmark

Resources

• Python official guide to write extensions: https://docs.python.org/3/extending/index.html
• Example package of Python building with Zig: https://github.com/Lucifer-02/python_zig
• Zig documentation: https://ziglang.org/documentation/0.11.0/