It is a built-in object in Node.js that represents binary data.
Buffers are commonly used for reading and writing binary data, from and to files, working with network protocols, and cryptography, and handling data in binary formats like images, audio, and video.
buffers were introduced in Node.js to provide a proper set of APIs to manipulate bits and bytes in an easy and performant way.
Handling Binary Data: Buffers are used when dealing with TCP streams or performing read-write operations on the file system, which require handling pure binary data.
Efficiency: Buffers provide a fast and efficient way to store and manipulate binary data in Node.js. They are particularly useful when you're interacting with binary data at lower networking levels.
Memory Management: Buffers refer to a particular memory location. Unlike arrays, which can be of any type and resizable, buffers only deal with binary data and are not resizable. This makes them more memory efficient.
Data Manipulation: Buffers equip you with the ability to do fine-grained data manipulation in Node.js. For example, you might need to concatenate two binary data streams, slice a large binary file into smaller pieces, or encode and decode binary data into different character encodings.