Performances implications of switching from Buffer to Uint8Array

[Daniel Lando]

I would be curious to know what are the performances implications about this, will the transition boost or reduce performances? Browser apart where Buffer is polifilled using Uint8Array, Uint8Array could be drammatically slower in nodejs environments compared to Buffer

[Sindre Sorhus]

Performance should in theory be the same for most operations as Buffer is a subclass of Uint8Array.

Buffer does have some unique performance optimizations with pooling, but that also has problems.

The main potential performance problems are encoding/decoding to Base64/Hex as Uint8Array doesn't have any native handling for that, yet. But it really depends on your usage and how performance sensitive your code is. The Hex conversion methods in this package should be pretty fast though.

[Daniel Lando]

Thanks for the links provided, I think that creating a banchmark test would be useful to make clear the benefits and the downsides of the move (right now).

[Jimmy Wärting]

if you want some better / faster perf, have a look at: https://github.com/ThaUnknown/uint8-util
i helped out increasing webtorrent speed with this and also the buffer browserified version of eg to/from hex

[Sindre Sorhus]

if you want some better / faster perf, have a look at: https://github.com/ThaUnknown/uint8-util

This is not a useful comment. At minimum explain how it's faster. Ideally, back it up with benchmarks.