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”?

On my computer, about 1,000x faster than pure Ruby (your mileage my vary):

$ ruby test/benchmark.rb
      user     system      total        real
Ruby:  2.070000   0.930000   3.000000 (  3.004088)
C   :  0.010000   0.000000   0.010000 (  0.003045)

Author: Steve Sloan ([email protected])
Website: github.com/CodeMonkeySteve/fast_xor
License: MIT