I/O buffers are first-in-first-out queues of bytes.

Buffers are backed by manually allocated storage that does not get moved by the garbage collector; they are also low-level and sacrifice error checking for efficiency.

Buffers are used to implement native I/O backends.

Buffer words are found in the io.buffers vocabulary.

buffer

<buffer> ( n -- buffer )

Buffers must be manually deallocated by calling dispose.

Buffer operations:

buffer-reset ( n buffer -- )

buffer-length ( buffer -- n )

buffer-empty? ( buffer -- ? )

buffer-capacity ( buffer -- n )

buffer@ ( buffer -- alien )

Reading from the buffer:

buffer-peek ( buffer -- byte )

buffer-pop ( buffer -- byte )

buffer-read ( n buffer -- byte-array )

Writing to the buffer:

byte>buffer ( byte buffer -- )

>buffer ( byte-array buffer -- )

n>buffer ( n buffer -- )