Skip to content

update readme with "Why Uint8Array" and "Why type: bytes" #14

New issue

Have a question about this project? Sign up for a free GitHub account to open an issue and contact its maintainers and the community.

Sign up for GitHub

By clicking “Sign up for GitHub”, you agree to our terms of service and privacy statement. We’ll occasionally send you account related emails.

Already on GitHub? Sign in to your account

Merged
merged 1 commit into from
Aug 1, 2025
Merged

update readme with "Why Uint8Array" and "Why type: bytes" #14

Changes from all commits
Commits
Show all changes
1 commit
Select commit
File filter

Filter by extension

Filter by extension
Conversations
Failed to load comments.
Loading
Jump to
Jump to file
Failed to load files.
Loading
Diff view
Diff view
8 changes: 8 additions & 0 deletions README.md
View file
Open in desktop
Original file line number Diff line number Diff line change
Expand Up @@ -141,6 +141,10 @@ Mutable can be problematic for several reasons:

See discussion in Issue https://github.com/styfle/proposal-import-bytes/issues/2 and https://github.com/styfle/proposal-import-bytes/issues/5

### Why Uint8Array?

Uint8Array is compatible with [Node.js Buffer](https://nodejs.org/api/buffer.html#buffer) which makes it widely compatible with existing JavaScript code.

### Why not ArrayBuffer?

ArrayBuffers cannot be read from directly; the developer must create a view, such as a Uint8Array, to read data. Providing a Uint8Array avoids that additional effort.
Expand All @@ -158,3 +162,7 @@ Blob is part of the W3C [File API](https://www.w3.org/TR/FileAPI/), not part of
ReadableStream is part of the WHATWG [Streams](https://streams.spec.whatwg.org), not part of JavaScript, so it is not a viable solution to include in a TC39 Proposal. Furthermore, there is [no helper method](https://github.com/whatwg/streams/issues/1019) to turn a stream into a buffer so this won't solve the original motivation of writing isomorphic JavaScript.

See discussion in Issue https://github.com/styfle/proposal-import-bytes/issues/3

### Why `type: bytes`?

The `bytes()` method is familiar to those using [Response.bytes()](https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Response/bytes) or newer [Blob.bytes()](https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Blob/bytes) which both return Uint8Array.