Re: IOBuffer vs. Buffer

Arne Goedeke wrote:

Returning the buffer is cheap assuming that you have one already. Otherwise you have the cost of object creation, which - depending on the length of the buffer content - will be more expensive than the potential memcpy.

Erm... We are *in* a Buffer object, so by definition we have one. So returning a readonly-copy with zero-copy effort is easy. It basically delays the creation of the shared string as long as possible.

In what places do you think it would make sense to return a buffer object instead of a string?

As long as one is doing string operations (adding/substracting/matching) Buffer objects are better. Once done with that, the final "result" can/should be a shared string.