msgpack-lite

Fast Pure JavaScript MessagePack Encoder and Decoder

Online demo: http://kawanet.github.io/msgpack-lite/

Features

• Pure JavaScript only (No node-gyp nor gcc required)
• Faster than any other pure JavaScript libraries on node.js v4
• Even faster than C++ based msgpack library (90% faster on encoding)
• Streaming encoding and decoding interface is also available. It's more faster.
• Browsers ready (Chrome, Firefox, Safari and even works on IE8)
• Tested on Node.js v0.10, v0.12 and v4.2 as well as browsers

Encoding and Decoding MessagePack

var msgpack = require("msgpack-lite");

// encode from JS Object to MessagePack (Buffer)
var buffer = msgpack.encode({"foo": "bar"});

// decode from MessagePack (Buffer) to JS Object
var data = msgpack.decode(buffer); // => {"foo": "bar"}

// if encode/decode receives an invalid argument an error is thrown

Writing to MessagePack Stream

var fs = require("fs");
var msgpack = require("msgpack-lite");

var writeStream = fs.createWriteStream("test.msp");
var encodeStream = msgpack.createEncodeStream();
encodeStream.pipe(writeStream);

// send multiple objects to stream
encodeStream.write({foo: "bar"});
encodeStream.write({baz: "qux"});

Reading from MessagePack Stream

var fs = require("fs");
var msgpack = require("msgpack-lite");

var readStream = fs.createReadStream("test.msp");
var decodeStream = msgpack.createDecodeStream();

// show multiple objects decoded from stream
readStream.pipe(decodeStream).on("data", console.warn);

Command Line Interface

A CLI tool bin/msgpack converts data stream from JSON to MessagePack and vice versa.

$ echo '{"foo": "bar"}' | ./bin/msgpack -Jm | od -tx1
0000000    81  a3  66  6f  6f  a3  62  61  72

$ echo '{"foo": "bar"}' | ./bin/msgpack -Jm | ./bin/msgpack -Mj
{"foo":"bar"}

Installation

$ npm install --save msgpack-lite

Tests

Run tests on node.js:

$ make test

Run tests on browsers:

$ make test-browser-local
open the following url in a browser:
http://localhost:4000/__zuul

Browser Build

Browser version msgpack.min.js is also available. 37KB minified, 11KB gziped.

<!--[if lte IE 9]>
<script src="https://cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/es5-shim/4.1.10/es5-shim.min.js"></script>
<script src="https://cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/json3/3.3.2/json3.min.js"></script>
<![endif]-->
<script src="https://rawgithub.com/kawanet/msgpack-lite/master/dist/msgpack.min.js"></script>
<script>
// encode from JS Object to MessagePack (Uint8Array)
var buffer = msgpack.encode({foo: "bar"});

// decode from MessagePack (Uint8Array) to JS Object
var array = new Uint8Array([0x81, 0xA3, 0x66, 0x6F, 0x6F, 0xA3, 0x62, 0x61, 0x72]);
var data = msgpack.decode(array);
</script>

Interoperability

It is tested to have basic compatibility with other Node.js MessagePack modules below:

• https://www.npmjs.com/package/msgpack (1.0.2)
• https://www.npmjs.com/package/msgpack-js (0.3.0)
• https://www.npmjs.com/package/msgpack-js-v5 (0.3.0-v5)
• https://www.npmjs.com/package/msgpack-unpack (2.1.1)
• https://github.com/msgpack/msgpack-javascript (msgpack.codec)
• https://www.npmjs.com/package/msgpack5 (3.3.0)
• https://www.npmjs.com/package/notepack (0.0.2)

Benchmarks

A benchmark tool lib/benchmark.js is available to compare encoding/decoding speed (operation per second) with other MessagePack modules. It counts operations of 1KB JSON document in 10 seconds.

Streaming benchmark tool lib/benchmark-stream.js is also available. It counts milliseconds for 1,000,000 operations of 30 bytes fluentd msgpack fragment. This shows streaming encoding and decoding are super faster.

Test environment: msgpack-lite 0.1.14, Node v4.2.3, Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-2666 v3 @ 2.90GHz

MessagePack Mapping Table

The following table shows how JavaScript objects (value) will be mapped to MessagePack formats and vice versa.

Note that both null and undefined are mapped to nil 0xC1 type. This means undefined value will be upgraded to null in other words.

Extension Types

The MessagePack specification allows 128 application-specific extension types. The library uses the following types to make round-trip conversion possible for JavaScript native objects.

Other extension types are mapped to internal ExtBuffer object.

Repository

• https://github.com/kawanet/msgpack-lite

See Also

• http://msgpack.org/

License

The MIT License (MIT)

Copyright (c) 2015 Yusuke Kawasaki

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.