Implementing a Copyless Redis Protocol in Rust with Parsing Combinators

Redis is a fantastic noSQL database with a beautifully simple design. One of the fundamental responsibilities of the redis server is to encode and decode RESP (Redis Serialization Protocol) messages. For example, when a client issues the command:

SET foo bar

That's encoded by the client and sent to the server as:

*3\r\n$3\r\nSET\r\n$3\r\nfoo$3\r\nbar\r\n

It's not necessary important to understand that RESP message right now, but the server will need to decode that back into something equivalent so it can perform the operation. This blog post will go through my efforts to implement a copyless RESP parser in redis-oxide.