Chronicle Bytes contains all the low level memory access wrappers. It is built on Chronicle Core's direct memory and OS system call access.
Chronicle Bytes has a similar purpose to Java NIO's ByteBuffer with some extensions.
The API supports.
- 64-bit sizes
- UTF-8 and ISO-8859-1 encoded strings.
- thread safe off heap memory operations.
- deterministic release of resources via reference counting.
- compressed data types such as stop bit encoding.
- elastic ByteBuffer wrappers which resize as required.
- parsing text and writing text directly to off heap bytes.
| Access | ByteBuffer | Netty IOBuffer | Aeron UnsafeBuffer | Chronicle Bytes |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Read/write primitives in native memory | yes | yes | yes | yes |
| Separate Mutable interfaces | run time check | run time check | yes | yes |
| Read/Write UTF8 strings | no | no | String | any CharSequence + Appendable |
| Read/Write ISO-8859-1 strings | no | no | ? | any CharSequence + Appendable |
| Support Endianness | Big and Little | Big and Little | Big and Little | Native only |
| Size of buffer | 31-bit | 31-bit | 31-bit | 63-bit |
| Elastic ByteBuffers | no | yes | no | yes |
| Disable bounds checks | no | no | set globally | by buffer |
| Wrap an address | no | no | yes | yes |
| Thread safe read/write, CAS and atomic add operations | no | no | int, long | int, long, float and double |
| Streaming access | yes | yes | no | yes |
| Deterministic release of memory | Internal API | Internal API | Caller's responsibility | yes |
| Separate read and write position | no | yes | na | yes |