color-bits

High-performance color library

This library represents RGBA colors as a single int32 number and avoids allocating memory as much as possible while parsing, handling, and formatting colors, to provide the best possible memory and CPU efficiency. For a full technical overview, read the blog post.

Benchmarks • Install • Technical details • Documentation • License

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⚡ Benchmarks

Library	Operations/sec	Relative speed
color-bits	22 966 299	fastest
colord	4 308 547	81.24% slower
tinycolor2	1 475 762	93.57% slower
chroma-js	846 924	96.31% slower
color	799 262	96.52% slower

🛠️ Install

pnpm install color-bits

📑 Technical details

Due to the compact representation, color-bits preserves at most 8 bits of precision for each channel, so an operation like lighten(color, 0.000001) would simply return the same color with no modification.

For performance reasons, the color representation is int32, not uint32. It is expected if you see negative numbers when you print the raw color value. Use the formatting functions to transform the color representation back into a usable format.

color-bits supports the full CSS Color Module Level 4 color spaces in absolute representations only, so:

• Yes: oklab(59.69% 0.1007 0.1191)
• No: oklab(from green l a b / 0.5)

When parsing and converting non-sRGB color spaces, color-bits behaves the same as browsers do, which differs from the formal CSS spec! In technical terms: non-sRGB color spaces with a wider gamut are converted using clipping rather than gamut-mapping.

Every function is tree-shakeable, so the bundle size cost should be from 1.5kb to 3kb, depending on which functions you use.

📚 Documentation

Docs for color-bits
Docs for color-bits/string

If you're storing and manipulating colors frequently, you should use the color-bits exports directly, e.g.

import * as Color from 'color-bits'

const background = Color.parse('#232323')
const seeThrough = Color.alpha(background, 0.5)
const output = Color.format(seeThrough) // #RRGGBBAA string

The color-bits/string module wraps some of the functions to accept string colors as input/output, which may be useful if you're not storing the colors but just transforming them on the fly. It can be faster than calling the functions separately in some cases.

import * as Color from 'color-bits/string'

const output = Color.alpha('#232323', 0.5) // #RRGGBBAA string

📜 License

I release any of the code I wrote here to the public domain. Feel free to copy/paste in part or in full without attribution.

Some parts of the codebase have been extracted from Chrome's devtools, MaterialUI, and stackoverflow, those contain a license notice or attribution in code comments, inline. Everything is MIT-compatible.

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