arraybuffer gem
What?
Ruby lacks classes like array buffer or byte array.
This gem aims to solve that by implementing that natively in C so that a decent performance can be achieved.
The design of the classes follows standards that are implemented in the Web world, like:
The standards above are, however, not strictly followed.
Why?
The only way I found to do this was manipulating an array of numbers
treating them as bytes and using buffer.pack('C*') to transform it
into a String object. However, for some reason the Array#pack method
is painfully slow.
Other gems exist out there, like the class ByteBuffer class in nio4r. However, they didn't had a design I was satisfied with or they had different purposes that wouldn't suit my use case :)
What about JRuby?
Feel free to open a pull request for that!