A BufferedReader is a super-powered Reader.

Like the BufRead trait, the BufferedReader trait has an internal buffer that is directly exposed to the user. This design enables two performance optimizations. First, the use of an internal buffer amortizes system calls. Second, exposing the internal buffer allows the user to work with data in place, which avoids another copy.

The BufRead trait, however, has a significant limitation for parsers: the user of a BufRead object can't control the amount of buffering. This is essential for being able to conveniently work with data in place, and being able to lookahead without consuming data. The result is that either the sizing has to be handled by the instantiator of the BufRead object---assuming the BufRead object provides such a mechanism---which is a layering violation, or the parser has to fallback to buffering if the internal buffer is too small, which eliminates most of the advantages of the BufRead abstraction. The BufferedReader trait addresses this shortcoming by allowing the user to control the size of the internal buffer.

The BufferedReader trait also has some functionality, specifically, a generic interface to work with a stack of BufferedReader objects, that simplifies using multiple parsers simultaneously. This is helpful when one parser deals with framing (e.g., something like HTTP's chunk transfer encoding), and another decodes the actual objects. It is also useful when objects are nested.

Details

Because the BufRead trait doesn't provide a mechanism for the user to size the internal buffer, a parser can't generally be sure that the internal buffer will be large enough to allow it to work with all data in place.

Using the standard BufRead implementation, BufReader, the instantiator can set the size of the internal buffer at creation time. Unfortunately, this mechanism is ugly, and not always adequate. First, the parser is typically not the instantiator. Thus, the instantiator needs to know about the implementation details of all of the parsers, which turns an implementation detail into a cross-cutting concern. Second, when working with dynamically sized data, the maximum amount of the data that needs to be worked with in place may not be known apriori, or the maximum amount may be significantly larger than the typical amount. This leads to poorly sized buffers.

Alternatively, the code that uses, but does not instantiate a BufRead object, can be changed to stream the data, or to fallback to reading the data into a local buffer if the internal buffer is too small. Both of these approaches increase code complexity, and the latter approach is contrary to the BufRead's goal of reducing unnecessary copying.

The BufferedReader trait solves this problem by allowing the user to dynamically (i.e., at read time, not open time) ensure that the internal buffer has a certain amount of data.

The ability to control the size of the internal buffer is also essential to straightforward support for speculative lookahead. The reason that speculative lookahead with a BufRead object is difficult is that speculative lookahead is /speculative/, i.e., if the parser backtracks, the data that was read must not be consumed. Using a BufRead object, this is not possible if the amount of lookahead is larger than the internal buffer. That is, if the amount of lookahead data is larger than the BufRead's internal buffer, the parser first has to BufRead::consume() some data to be able to examine more data. But, if the parser then decides to backtrack, it has no way to return the unused data to the BufRead object. This forces the parser to manage a buffer of read, but unconsumed data, which significantly complicates the code.

The BufferedReader trait also simplifies working with a stack of BufferedReaders in two ways. First, the BufferedReader trait provides generic methods to access the underlying BufferedReader. Thus, even when dealing with a trait object, it is still possible to recover the underlying BufferedReader. Second, the BufferedReader provides a mechanism to associate generic state with each BufferedReader via a cookie. Although it is possible to realize this functionality using a custom trait that extends the BufferedReader trait and wraps existing BufferedReader implementations, this approach eliminates a lot of error-prone, boilerplate code.