I had a long discussion with @jessicaquynh and @thealphanerd about moving this forward.

As of today this is what the bindings interface looks like. Full Documentation

list returns a list of objects describing available serialports
open takes a path and options, opens a file handle, and configures the port's baudRate, parity, stopbits, locking, and flow control.
close closes the file handle
read mimics fs.read but is guaranteed to read at least one byte (abstracting away uv_poll/epoll/I/O Completion Ports)
write mimics fs.writeFile
set/get sets and gets flow control flags and break status (probably conflated)
flush/drain flushes and drains the port at the os level.
update updates the buadrate of an open port (maybe more options in the future, not well defined yet)

This are the nodejs interfaces I wish I had that would allow me to not use any c/c++

fs.poll a callback interface to let me know the port is readable, writable, or disconnected
fs.read that worked for serialports on windows. I have a file handle but I get access denied
fs.writeFile that worked for serialports on all platforms. I haven't yet debugged what's going on but it doesn't work so we implemented something similar.
fs.flush to call tcflush or PurgeComm
fs.drain to call tcdrain or FlushFileBuffers
fs.setBaudRate Setting baudrates cross platform for custom and preset baud rates. 250k baud is currently not supported in node serialport because it's hard. There are a finite set of tricks for linux, osx and windows to make this work right and serialport hasn't yet figured them all out yet.
fs.setFlowControl / fs.getFlowControl to set and get flow control flags
fs.getBreak / fs.clearBreak to set and clear break status.

Here are the c functions I use that could have JS equivalents. We could build some of the above with these functions.

Track NodeJS native serial port suport #555

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