I recently contributed to the open-source project “Chronicle Decentred” which is a high-performance decentralized ledger based on blockchain technology. For our binary access, we relied on a library called “Chronicle Bytes” which caught my attention. In this article, I will share some of the learnings I made while using the Bytes library.
What Is Bytes?
Bytes is a library that provides functionality similar to Java’s built-in ByteBuffer but obviously with some extensions. Both provide a basic abstraction of a buffer storing bytes with additional features over working with raw arrays of bytes. They are also both a VIEW of underlying bytes and can be backed by a raw array of bytes but also native memory (off-heap) or perhaps even a file.