[Help] Does the FST file format work cross-platform?

[akprasad]

First, thank you for this marvelous library. I'm experimenting with fst for my first ever Rust project, and for my use case, fst provides 10x the compression of gzip with a minimal lookup penalty at runtime.

My question is: does the .fst file created by MapBuilder work across platforms? Ideally I could generate this file just once on my Macbook then distribute it across all of the platforms I want to support: Linux x64, Wasm, ...

I checked the docs, but I couldn't find a clear answer to this question. But then again, I'm a Rust newbie who's fairly new to systems programming, so perhaps there's an obvious answer I'm just not aware of.

Thank you for your time!

(PS: I'm not sure what the right forum is for help questions, so forgive me if I'm in the wrong place.)

[BurntSushi]

Yes. If it weren't cross platform, then there would be different functions for serializing the FST, like how regex-automata has both big-endian and little-endian serialization routines: https://docs.rs/regex-automata/latest/regex_automata/dfa/dense/struct.DFA.html#impl-3

For FSTs though, endianness is always explicitly specified when reading and writing, so there aren't any platform incompatibility issues. To be clear, the exact same byte-for-byte FST can be used on any platform, regardless of endianness or anything else.