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I don't understand what is the purpose of the Buffer.isBuffer function when instanceof works like a charm :
var b = new Buffer('blabla') assert.ok(b instanceof Buffer) 
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The Buffer. copy() method simply copies all the values from input buffer to another buffer.
Buffers in Streams Streams work on a concept called buffer. A buffer is a temporary memory that a stream takes to hold some data until it is consumed. In a stream, the buffer size is decided by the highWatermark property on the stream instance which is a number denoting the size of the buffer in bytes.
Node provides Buffer class which provides instances to store raw data similar to an array of integers but corresponds to a raw memory allocation outside the V8 heap. Buffer class is a global class that can be accessed in an application without importing the buffer module.
A Buffer is a temporary memory that holds data until it is consumed. A Buffer represents a fixed-size chunk of memory allocated outside of the V8 JavaScript engine. You can think of a Buffer like an array of integers that each represent a byte of data. The Buffer.
Well, actually these are the same (currently at least):
-- lib/buffer.js:
Buffer.isBuffer = function isBuffer(b) { return util.isBuffer(b); }; -- lib/util.js:
function isBuffer(arg) { return arg instanceof Buffer; } exports.isBuffer = isBuffer; ... so the only possible reason is readability. Note that before this specific implementation there was a set of macros for type checks, used when building the source. But it has been changed with this commit, and that was the reasoning:
Adding macros to Node's JS layer increases the barrier to contributions, and it breaks programs that export Node's js files for userland modules. (For example, several browserify transforms, my readable-streams polyfill, the util-debuglog module, etc.) These are not small problems.
I'd suggest checking the whole discussion in the commit's pull request.
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