Fast native implementation of binary buffer for MRI.

ByteBuffer is designed to be a drop in replacement of Ione::ByteBuffer from ione gem. It implements the same interface, extending it with support for additional numeric types and array operations.

It can be used for marshalling/demarshalling of binary frame PDUs. A prime example of such use case is code for handling cassandra native protocol which can be found in Cassandra::Protocol::CqlNativeByteBuffer class within custom branch of cassandra driver gem.

As hinted by the description above, main motivation for creating this gem is pursuit of performance. ByteBuffer::Buffer is designed to be faster than or even with implementations based on ruby strings and String#pack. Here are results of benchmarks taken with ruby 1.9.3 on Mac OS X:

  $ ./bin/benchmarks | grep slower
  bm_allocation - Ione::ByteBuffer:  1317389.4 i/s - 1.14x slower
  bm_churn - Ione::ByteBuffer space reuse, read/write interleaved:     6894.2 i/s - 3.32x slower
  bm_append_big - ByteBuffer::Buffer big strings:     7546.2 i/s - 1.03x slower
  bm_append_small - Ione::ByteBuffer small strings:    21482.4 i/s - 2.57x slower
  bm_append_int - Cassandra::Protocol::CqlByteBuffer:    11363.9 i/s - 10.46x slower
  bm_append_long - Cassandra::Protocol::CqlByteBuffer:     5554.0 i/s - 17.85x slower
  bm_append_double - Cassandra::Protocol::CqlByteBuffer:     8569.1 i/s - 11.54x slower
  bm_read - Cassandra::Protocol::CqlByteBuffer:    26853.6 i/s - 2.28x slower
  bm_read_int - Cassandra::Protocol::CqlByteBuffer:    17687.1 i/s - 5.64x slower
  bm_read_long - Cassandra::Protocol::CqlByteBuffer:    12658.3 i/s - 4.32x slower
  bm_read_double - Cassandra::Protocol::CqlByteBuffer:    15554.9 i/s - 3.94x slower

Add this line to your application's Gemfile:

gem 'byte_buffer'

And then execute:

$ bundle

Or install it yourself as:

$ gem install byte_buffer

TODO: Write usage instructions here

After checking out the repo, install dependencies by running:

  $ bundle install

Native module can be compiled by running:

  $ bundle exec rake compile

This should be enough to run tests successfully with:

  $ bundle exec rspec

Also, there's a script which runs benchmarks against Ione::ByteBuffer and Cassandra::Protocol::CqlNativeByteBuffer, here's how to run it:

  $ ./bin/benchmarks