v0.11 support

[mcollina]

Will this library be updated to v0.11?

[bnoordhuis]

Maybe. I'm not sure how many people still use buffertools; it was originally developed at a time when Buffer was still a bare-bones class but nowadays that class has grown a lot of buffertools-like functionality. Maybe it's better to get the missing pieces upstreamed (compare, search, others?)

[mcollina]

I agree.

It's quite used at the moment, it has ~700 downloads a day. Most of those libraries will need special attention for 0.11/0.12 in any case, but reworking a dependency it's harder.

Do you think that a JS-only implementation of this it's too slow?

[bnoordhuis]

It would have been at the time when the Buffer class was introduced (the V8 magic backing buffers was almost completely unoptimized back then) but the performance difference is probably within a factor of two or three now.

At any rate, making it compatible with v0.11 isn't that complicated so I did in commit 559ca71 and published it as v2.1.0. Note that it only works with node.js master though, not the last v0.11 release.

[mcollina]

Cool, the whole idea is to have it compatible with v0.12 when it comes out later this year.

[Mithgol]

@bnoordhuis

Maybe it's better to get the missing pieces upstreamed (compare, search, others?)

• [ ] .clear — there is .fill(0) in upstream
• [x] .compare — should be upstreamed
• [ ] .concat — there is .concat in upstream
• [x] .equals — should be upstreamed
• [x] .fill — should be upstreamed to improve the upstream's .fill in a backwards-compatible manner
• [ ] .fromHex — there is new Buffer(…, 'hex') in upstream
• [x] .indexOf — should be upstreamed
• [x] .reverse — should be upstreamed
• [ ] .toHex — there is .toString('hex') in upstream

[bnoordhuis]

.fill — should be upstreamed to improve the upstream's .fill in a backwards-compatible manner

Does buffertools.fill() do anything that Buffer#fill() doesn't? I was under the impression that Trevor had implemented most everything in master.

[Mithgol]

Does Node.js buffer accept integers, buffers, strings as its fill values?

The documentation does not (currently) say anything about the value's accepted types, though the example demonstrates a 1-character-long string (but not mentioning its implied encoding).

[bnoordhuis]

Does Node.js buffer accept integers, buffers, strings as its fill values?

It does though it decodes buffers and strings to UTF-8. I suppose that's one possible enhancement, specifying the encoding.

[Mithgol]

Also, instead of decoding buffers to UTF-8, it probably should encode strings to buffers and fill buffers with buffers. Would make more sense.