C functions to encode/decode values in CBOR format, and a simple command line utility to convert between JSON and CBOR.

To integrate CBOR into your application:

• Call duk_cbor_encode() and duk_cbor_decode() directly if a C API is enough.
• Call duk_cbor_init() to register a global CBOR object with ECMAScript bindings CBOR.encode() and CBOR.decode(), roughly matching https://github.com/paroga/cbor-js.

Basic usage of the jsoncbor conversion tool:

$ make jsoncbor
[...]
$ cat test.json | ./jsoncbor -e   # writes CBOR to stdout
$ cat test.cbor | ./jsoncbor -d   # writes JSON to stdout

CBOR objects are decoded into ECMAScript objects, with non-string keys coerced into strings.

Direct support for CBOR is likely to be included in the Duktape API in the future. This extra will then become unnecessary.

CBOR is a standard format for JSON-like binary interchange. It is faster and smaller, and can encode more data types than JSON. In particular, binary data can be serialized without encoding e.g. in base-64. These properties make it useful for e.g. storing state files, IPC, etc.

Some CBOR shortcomings for preserving information:

• No property attribute or inheritance support.
• No DAGs or looped graphs.
• Array objects with properties lose their non-index properties.
• Array objects with gaps lose their gaps as they read back as undefined.
• Buffer objects and views lose much of their detail besides the raw data.
• ECMAScript strings cannot be fully represented; strings must be UTF-8.
• Functions and native objects lose most of their detail.
• CBOR tags are useful to provide soft decoding information, but the tags are just integers from an IANA controlled space with no space for custom tags. So tags cannot be easily used for private, application specific tags.

• Decode test cases, also for cases we don't produce.
• https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-jroatch-cbor-tags/?include_text=1 could be used for typed arrays.
• 64-bit integer encoding.
• Better 64-bit integer decoding (workaround for non-64-bit targets).
• Objects with non-string keys, could be represented as a Map.
• Definite-length object encoding even when object has more than 23 keys.