A small, fast CBOR parser/serializer. Fork of @atcute/cbor, geared towards general purpose use: no strict
DRISL compliance checks, no special support of IPLD content identifiers, etc.
On Node.js 26, smol-cbor is only 1.2x slower than JSON.parse and 1.5x slower than JSON.stringify without any
native code involved.
Warning
🚧 smol-cbor is currently in beta, although it should already be safe to use in production. It should already work flawlessly for simple things, though more advanced features of RFC 8949 remains to do.
In the future I'd like to explore adding a native module for server-side or CLI workloads. In the short term, the
intent is to expand CBOR support beyond the DRISL subset while retaining the excellent performance profile and very
small footprint of the core @atcute/cbor.
smol-cbor originates from @atcute/cbor by Mary 🐇 (to which I've contributed a handful of performance tweaks!).