String XOR Ruby Extension¶ ↑

fast_xor is a simple extension which provides fast in-place String XOR functions, suitable for cryptography.

How do you use it?¶ ↑

require 'xor'

# two-argument version
a, b = 'a string', 'another string'
a.xor!(b)
a == "\000N\034\000\032\f\034G"

# three-argument version
a, b, c = 'a string', 'another string', 'yet another string'
a.xor!(b, c)
a == "y+h {bs3"

How fast is “Fast”?¶ ↑

Almost 50x faster than pure Ruby, on my machine (your mileage my vary):

$ ./benchmark
            user       system     total      real
Ruby     :  6.100000   0.010000   6.110000 (  6.307756)
C (x1000):  0.140000   0.000000   0.140000 (  0.144665)

Author: Steve Sloan (steve@finagle.org)
Website: github.com/CodeMonkeySteve/fast_xor
License: MIT