Both of these encode a four-character string such as "JPEG" as a uint32_t value. Computers can compare two integer values faster than they can compare two arbitrary strings.
Both schemes maintain ordering: if two four-character strings s and t satisfy (s < t), and those strings have valid numerical encodings, then the numerical values also satisfy (encoding(s) < encoding(t)).
FourCC codes are not specific to Wuffs. For example, the AVI multimedia container format can hold various sub-formats, such as “H264” or “YV12”, distinguished in the overall file format by their FourCC code.
The FourCC encoding is the straightforward sequence of each character's ASCII encoding. The FourCC code for "JPEG" is 0x4A504547, since 'J' is 0x4A, 'P' is 0x50, etc. This is essentially 8 bits for each character, 32 bits overall. The big-endian representation of this number is exactly the ASCII (and UTF-8) string "JPEG".
Other FourCC documentation sometimes use a little-endian convention, so that the {0x4A, 0x50, 0x45, 0x47} bytes on the wire for "JPEG" corresponds to the number 0x4745504A (little-endian) instead of 0x4A504547 (big-endian). Wuffs uses the big-endian interpretation, as it maintains ordering.
Base38 is a tighter encoding than FourCC, fitting four characters into 21 bits instead of 32 bits. This is achieved by using a smaller alphabet of 38 possible values (‘.’, 0-9, a-z or ‘~’), so that it cannot distinguish between e.g. an upper case ‘X’ and a lower case ‘x’. There are then two happy coincidences:
38 ** 4 = 0x1FD110 = 2085136 is slightly smaller than 2 ** 21 = 0x200000 = 2097152.The base38 encoding of "jpeg" is 0x1153D3, which is 1135571, which is ((20 * (38 ** 3)) + (26 * (38 ** 2)) + (15 * (38 ** 1)) + (17 * (38 ** 0))).
The minimum base38 value, 0x000000, corresponds to "....". Depending on context, this can be used as a default, built-in or placeholder value.
The maximum base38 value, 0x1FD10F = 2085135, corresponds to "~~~~". Depending on context, this can be used as a “matches everything” wildcard.
The maximum 21-bit value, 0x1FFFFF = 2097151, is not a valid base38 value but can still be used in some contexts as a sentinel or option-not-set value.
Using only 21 bits means that we can use base38 values to partition the set of possible uint32_t values into file-format specific enumerations. Each package (i.e. Wuffs implementation of a specific file format) can define up to 1024 local values in their own four-character namespace, without conflicting with other packages (assuming that there aren't e.g. two "jpeg" Wuffs packages in the same library). The conventional uint32_t packing is:
31 (1 bit) is reserved (zero).10 ..= 30 (21 bits) are the base38-encoded namespace, shifted by 10.0 ..= 9 (10 bits) are the local enumeration value.For example:
((namespace << 10) | local) scheme.