NOTE: This project is still very much in Alpha. Most stuff doesn't work and what does may change at any moment

Zod Binary Interface

Zod Binary Interface is a FOSS library that allows for the encoding and decoding of JavaScript and Typescript objects to and from binary. It accomplishes this by utilizing the often pre-existing Zod schema definitions.

Usage

Installing

# npm
npm install zod-binary-interface
# Yarn
yarn add zod-binary-interface

Global Instance

The entire library is interacted with through a global instance of ZodBinaryInterface, which stores and flattens the zod schema all data goes through.

import { z } from "zod";
import { ZodBinaryInterface } from "zod-binary-interface";

const exampleSchema = z.schema({
  foo: z.string(),
  bar: z.number(),
});

const zbi = ZodBinaryInterface.fromSchema(exampleSchema);

Encoding

Encoding transforms your data from a JavaScript object to a binary ArrayBuffer.

Binary ArrayBuffers like these can be easily transferred in requests and saved to local files.

const sampleData: z.infer<typeof exampleSchema> = {
  foo: "Foo",
  bar: 100,
};

const buffer = zbi.encode(sampleData);
//    ^?: ArrayBuffer

Decoding

Decoding transforms your data from a Javascript ArrayBuffer, back into the original object form.

Decoding internally utilizes the supplied zod schema to validate the data.

const data = zbi.decode(buffer);
//    ^?: { foo: string, bar: number }

Benchmarks

Benchmarking is an ongoing process.

Name	Iterations	ZBI Time	ZBI Size	JSON Time	JSON Size
Booleans	1	1.699104 seconds	4 bytes	0.046286 seconds	455 bytes
Booleans	100	0.137128 seconds	4 bytes	0.008153 seconds	455 bytes

Developing

git clone https://github.com/KennanHunter/zod-binary-interface.git
cd zod-binary-interface

yarn
yarn test

# Benchmarking (builds in background)
yarn benchmark

# Only needed for final publishing
yarn build

There exists recommended extensions and basic settings in the .vscode folder.