This seems a bit overcomplicated to me. Using a bitmap to track letters you've seen is a great idea. But the parity and counting gives me a headache. How about

This seems a bit overcomplicated to me. Using a bitmap to track letters you've seen is a great idea. But the parity and counting gives me a headache. How about you start with a zero-size window at the start of the string, then iteratively try to grow it by moving the end forward until it's long enough, and if the character added would be a duplicate, moving the start forward until it's no longer a duplicate? Sort of inchworm-style movement. I am not smart enough to write Rust, so here it is in Java: private static int run(String input, int windowSize) { int windowStart = 0; // start at the start int windowEnd = 0; // the window is initially zero-size int lettersSeen = 0; // a bitmap of letters we have seen while (windowEnd - windowStart < windowSize) { if (windowEnd >= input.length()) throw new IllegalArgumentException("No unique window found"); int letterToAdd = 1 << input.charAt(windowEnd) - 'a'; while ((lettersSeen & letterToAdd) != 0) { // duplicate, slide the start until we drop the original int letterToRemove = 1 << input.charAt(windowStart) - 'a'; assert (lettersSeen & letterToRemove) == letterToRemove; // sanity check that we have seen this letter lettersSeen ^= letterToRemove; ++windowStart; } // add the new letter assert (lettersSeen & letterToAdd) == 0; // sanity check that we have seen this letter lettersSeen ^= letterToAdd; ++windowEnd; } return windowStart; } This is not quite optimal in terms of bit operations - i mask the bitmap in the inner loop condition, but you could just test letterToRemove against letterToAdd and break if they're the same. I think that's a bit less readable though. Note that although this has two nested loops, they don't both independently range over the whole string, so this is not O(n^2). The outer loop moves windowEnd over the whole string, and the inner one moves windowStart over the whole string bit by bit. Each index visits each position in the string at most once.