Replace Buffer with UInt8Array functions on browsers

[davalapar]

Usage of Buffer isn't really necessary for browsers.

We just want simpler functions that let us encode and decode data to/from UInt8Array instances.

Looking at https://github.com/feross/buffer/blob/master/index.js the implemetation actually has internal checks and assertions which could be skipped, which could speed up our encoding and decoding process in the browser.

If this ever succeeds, we can even use these UInt8Array functions on the node implementation for speed, since UInt8Arrays can be converted to Buffer instances anyways.

Notes:

• This would also require stricter type checks, such as isPlainObject implementation from Lodash.
• fetch requests accepts UInt8Array instances directly as ArrayBufferView, XMLHttpRequest also accepts UInt8Array as BufferSource
  • https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Fetch_API/Using_Fetch#Body
  • https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/XMLHttpRequest/send
• fetch response body has .arrayBuffer() method which returns an ArrayBuffer
• ArrayBuffer to UInt8Array : new UInt8Array(arrayBuffer);
• UInt8Array to ArrayBuffer : ( new UInt8Array() ).buffer
  • byteOffset must also always be considered: https://stackoverflow.com/a/54646864

References

• https://github.com/feross/buffer/blob/master/index.js
• https://github.com/feross/ieee754/blob/master/index.js

[davalapar]

Notes

• Currently at branch ui8
• process.binding('buffer') is now deprecated and set to be removed in future node releases, so for fuck's sake we will be using native Buffer instances for speed in server-side implementation

References

• https://github.com/feross/buffer/blob/master/index.js
• https://github.com/nodejs/node/blob/master/lib/buffer.js
• https://github.com/nodejs/node/blob/master/lib/internal/buffer.js

[davalapar]

read & write utf8

• https://github.com/mapbox/pbf/blob/master/index.js