Buffer-lite NPM

buffer-lite

Implements Node-style Buffer's on the browser with minimal overhead

We already have this, why did you do this?

This package was originally created in 2020 under the belief that the standard buffer npm package was too supportive of legacy browsers, and under-utilized native browser features. buffer-lite is able to achieve zero dependencies while still remaining performant by...

Using the global atob and btoa functions for base-64 conversion
Using the native TextEncoder and TextDecoder classes for utf8 conversion
Using the magic of spread-operators to eliminate String.fromCharCode loops (for small buffers) during text encoding.

What version of NodeJS did you write this in mind?

At the time of writing, buffer-lite is feature-compatible with NodeJS v20.7.0. (It even has base64url support!) However, it only provides the Buffer class, and does not provide the other functions/constants provided by node:buffer. It also currently doesn't implement the inspect method.

What's the oldest ECMAScript version this thing works with?

ES2017. This means that despite implementing the read/write bigint methods, this package can be used in environments that don't have bigints. However, errors will be thrown if you attempt to use said methods in an environment which doesn't have a global BigInt function.