Benefits and Drawbacks

[alanshaw]

Some notes hanging around on my desktop:

Benefits

• Tiny bundle size
  • Import just the part you want to use:
  • const add = require('ipfs-http-client-lite/src/add')(); await add(...)
• Uses window.fetch and node-fetch under the hood
• Pass a custom fetch implementation
• Cancelable requests with AbortSignal for all requests
• Pubsub works in the browser

Drawbacks

• No custom classes returned from API methods
  • No CIDs
  • No PeerInfos
  • No PeerIds
  • etc.
• No support for passing CIDs as buffers to API methods
• Not interface-ipfs-core compatible
  • Although a CoreAdapter exists to allow tests to run
• No APIs that return Node.js style streams (big bundle size inflate if include readable-stream)
  • Hence, missing:
    • addReadableStream
    • catReadableStream
  • That said, APIs can consume Node.js streams because they are async iterable

Eventually:

ipfs-http-client could just export new CoreAdapter(ipfsLiteClient)