zig-cobs

Consistent Overhead Byte Stuffing (COBS) framing in pure Zig. Zero allocation, no dependencies, suitable for embedded targets and high-throughput stream framing on hosts.

COBS turns an arbitrary byte stream into a zero-free encoded form so that a single 0x00 byte can be used as an unambiguous frame delimiter. Worst-case overhead is 1 + ceil(len / 254) bytes — about 0.4% on long payloads.

Reference: Cheshire & Baker, Consistent Overhead Byte Stuffing (SIGCOMM 1997).

Status

v1.1.0 — stable API. The public surface (encode, decode, maxEncodedLength, two error variants) is locked: breaking changes will be v2.0. 22 tests pass (21 correctness/robustness + 1 fuzz harness), covering:

• Round-trip correctness across the size × content-pattern matrix (every documented edge case)
• Encoded-form invariants (no 0x00 bytes in any encoded body, length ≤ maxEncodedLength)
• 10,000-iteration random round-trip fuzz
• 10,000-iteration garbage-decode never-panic robustness
• Exhaustive single-bit-flip mutation of canonical encoded frames (decode either errors or returns — never crashes)
• v1.1 fuzz harness: 117,000-trial bounded-input fuzz gated in CI

Production-grade benchmarks shipped (zig build bench). Zero allocation, no third-party dependencies, freestanding-friendly.

Minimum Zig version: 0.16.0.

Install

Add zig-cobs to your build.zig.zon dependencies:

.dependencies = .{
    .cobs = .{
        .url = "https://github.com/SMC17/zig-cobs/archive/refs/tags/v1.0.0.tar.gz",
        .hash = "...",
    },
},

Then in build.zig:

const cobs = b.dependency("cobs", .{
    .target = target,
    .optimize = optimize,
});
exe.root_module.addImport("cobs", cobs.module("cobs"));

Quickstart

const std = @import("std");
const cobs = @import("cobs");

pub fn main() !void {
    const payload = "hello\x00world";

    // Size the output buffer using the worst-case formula.
    var encoded: [cobs.maxEncodedLength(payload.len)]u8 = undefined;
    const enc_len = try cobs.encode(payload, &encoded);

    // Encoded form contains no zero bytes; append a 0x00 delimiter when
    // transmitting over a stream.
    std.debug.print("encoded {} bytes\n", .{enc_len});

    var decoded: [payload.len]u8 = undefined;
    const dec_len = try cobs.decode(encoded[0..enc_len], &decoded);

    std.debug.assert(std.mem.eql(u8, payload, decoded[0..dec_len]));
}

API

pub fn maxEncodedLength(input_len: usize) usize;
pub fn encode(src: []const u8, dst: []u8) Error!usize;
pub fn decode(src: []const u8, dst: []u8) Error!usize;

pub const Error = error{
    BufferTooSmall,
    InvalidEncoding,
};

• maxEncodedLength — exact worst-case size of an encoded buffer for an input of input_len bytes. Use it to size dst for encode.
• encode — write the COBS-encoded form of src into dst. Returns the number of bytes written. dst.len must be at least maxEncodedLength(src.len); otherwise returns error.BufferTooSmall. Encoded output never contains a 0x00 byte.
• decode — write the decoded payload of a COBS frame src into dst. Returns the number of payload bytes written. src must not contain a 0x00 byte; if it does, returns error.InvalidEncoding. The frame delimiter 0x00 is not part of src — strip it before calling.

Tests

zig build test

21 tests. Fuzz and property tests now cover round-trip across every documented size × content-pattern corner plus 10k random adversarial payloads, and exercise the decoder against random bytes and single-bit-flipped frames to confirm it never panics.

Includes:

• Boundary cases at empty input, single-zero, single-non-zero, 254-byte runs (no overhead injection), 255-byte runs (overhead byte injected).
• Encoded-output invariant: no 0x00 bytes in any encoded frame.
• Buffer-undersize rejection on both encode and decode.
• Malformed-frame rejection (zero byte mid-frame, truncated frame).
• Property-based roundtrip across lengths 0–2048 with pseudo-random payloads.
• Property-based check that encode output is always ≤ maxEncodedLength.
• Property-based round-trip across the size × content-pattern matrix ({0, 1, 2, 7, 8, 254, 255, 256, 512, 1024} × seven patterns including all-zero, no-zero, alternating, single-zero placements, and the 254-byte worst-case-overhead run).
• Property-based encoded-form invariants across the same matrix.
• Fuzz: 10,000 random-length, random-content round-trips.
• Fuzz: 10,000 random byte sequences fed to decode to confirm it never panics on garbage input.
• Fuzz: exhaustive single-bit-flip mutations of canonical encoded frames, asserting decode only ever returns or errors — never crashes.

Use cases

• Serial / UART framing over MCUs (ESP32, STM32, RP2040)
• Sensor data streams over unreliable links
• USB CDC or BLE characteristic stream framing
• Any byte stream where a single-byte unambiguous frame delimiter is desired

Why no allocator parameter

encode and decode operate strictly on caller-provided buffers. This keeps the library usable on freestanding targets, in interrupt handlers, and in contexts where allocator failure is not an option. Compute the required buffer size with maxEncodedLength at the call site.

Benchmarks

zig build bench

Three benchmarks ship under bench/:

• bench_encode.zig — encode throughput at 16 B / 256 B / 1 KiB / 64 KiB
• bench_decode.zig — decode throughput at the same matrix
• bench_worst_case.zig — 254-byte all-non-zero pattern (the boundary that triggers the COBS overhead-byte injection on every run; useful for spotting cliffs in the overhead-refresh path)

Each benchmark warms up for 1 000 iterations, then measures with enough iterations (5 M for 16 B, scaled down for larger sizes) to dampen variance across roughly one second of wall time. Output is parseable key=value lines so external collectors can scrape them. Timing uses std.os.linux.clock_gettime(.MONOTONIC, &ts) directly — std.time.Timer and std.time.nanoTimestamp were removed in Zig 0.16's stdlib reshuffle.

Representative numbers on the maintainer's workstation (Intel Core i7-1065G7 @ 1.30 GHz, Linux 7.0.3-arch1-1 x86_64, Zig 0.16.0, zig build bench with -Doptimize=ReleaseFast):

Bench	Size	ns/op	MB/s
encode (random)	256 B	1 933	132
encode (random)	1 KiB	17 478	58
encode (random)	64 KiB	410 359	159
decode (random)	256 B	1 391	183
decode (random)	64 KiB	276 451	237
encode (worst-case)	254 B	715	354
decode (worst-case)	254 B	1 215	209

The worst-case all-non-zero row is faster than the random-payload row because the inner loop has no zero-byte branch to mispredict; encode hits a straight-line copy with one overhead-byte refresh.

These numbers are on my workstation; bring your own data.

License

MIT. See LICENSE.

Contributing

Issues and PRs welcome. The code surface is intentionally small; changes should preserve zero-allocation, freestanding-friendly, and O(n) time properties.

Part of the Sovereign Stack

This is one of a set of small, composable Zig libraries.

• zig-frame-protocol — versioned binary frame protocol that uses zig-cobs for framing
• zig-graph — sparse undirected graph + spectral algorithms
• zig-h3 — H3 v4 spatial index, pure-Zig + libh3 wrapper

See github.com/SMC17 for the full portfolio.