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DataRepresentation

Hex Fiend relies on a fast, memory efficient representation of the data each document displays.

The most fundamental class in the data representation is the ByteSlice, which represents a conceptually immutable sequence of bytes. ByteSlice is abstract, with concrete subclasses FullMemoryByteSlice, SharedMemoryByteSlice, and OpenedFileByteSlice.

A ByteSlice is often contained by one or more ByteArrayPieces. While a ByteSlice is merely a sequence of bytes, a ByteArrayPiece knows the offset of that sequence within the document. Multiple ByteArrayPieces can share a single ByteSlice. ByteArrayPiece is concrete and has no subclasses.

The most important class is ByteArray, which is the model in the MVC design. ByteArray is conceptually a mutable array of ByteArrayPieces, but also a mutable sequence of bytes. ByteArray is abstract, with concrete subclasses FullMemoryByteArray and TavlTreeByteArray. Each MyDocument contains a single ByteArray, which represents the data for the document.