/**
* Licensed to the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) under one
* or more contributor license agreements. See the NOTICE file
* distributed with this work for additional information
* regarding copyright ownership. The ASF licenses this file
* to you under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the
* "License"); you may not use this file except in compliance
* with the License. You may obtain a copy of the License at
*
* http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0
*
* Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software
* distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS,
* WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied.
* See the License for the specific language governing permissions and
* limitations under the License.
*/
package org.apache.hadoop.io;
import java.util.Comparator;
import org.apache.hadoop.classification.InterfaceAudience;
import org.apache.hadoop.classification.InterfaceStability;
import org.apache.hadoop.io.serializer.DeserializerComparator;
/**
* <p>
* A {@link Comparator} that operates directly on byte representations of
* objects.
* </p>
* @param <T>
* @see DeserializerComparator
*/
@InterfaceAudience.Public
@InterfaceStability.Stable
public interface RawComparator<T> extends Comparator<T> {
/**
* Compare two objects in binary.
* b1[s1:l1] is the first object, and b2[s2:l2] is the second object.
*
* @param b1 The first byte array.
* @param s1 The position index in b1. The object under comparison's starting index.
* @param l1 The length of the object in b1.
* @param b2 The second byte array.
* @param s2 The position index in b2. The object under comparison's starting index.
* @param l2 The length of the object under comparison in b2.
* @return An integer result of the comparison.
*/
public int compare(byte[] b1, int s1, int l1, byte[] b2, int s2, int l2);
}