fix: replace node buffers with uint8arrays

[achingbrain]

All internal use of node Buffers have been replaced with browser-friendly Uint8Arrays and DataViews.

Also refactors test suite to run on browsers.

BREAKING CHANGE:

• Byte arrays returned from this module will now be UintArrays and not Node Buffers

[jacobheun]

The switch to aegir is causing mac and windows builds to fail because it can't run the browser tests. Need to update the travis file to specifically test browsers.

[Gozala]

@achingbrain I might be missing something, but I find it strange that decode / encode functions take both buffer (which I think is Uint8Array now) and dataView arguments. It appeals to me that it would be better to just have a dataView argument.

It is also worth considering that dataView passed may not be a view for the same buffer, which code seems to assume but does not verify that is the case.

I'll leave it up to you to decide what to do here.

[achingbrain]

I find it strange that decode / encode functions take both buffer (which I think is Uint8Array now) and dataView arguments. It appeals to me that it would be better to just have a dataView argument.

Yeah, it looks a bit weird - I may have missed something in the API, but I couldn't see how to get a Uint8Array out of a DataView without creating a new instance from the internal ArrayBuffer.

The structure of the module is that it uses the varint and signed-varint modules to do most of the heavy lifting which don't accept DataViews, only ArrayLikes. This is an incredibly hot codepath so I didn't want to be creating new objects for a single setXXX call (or alternatively create a new object just to pass to varint) then have it have to garbage collect the new object shortly afterwards.

Node's Buffer API combines DataView-style multiple number type getter/setters with the byte-array semantics of Uint8Arrays but the browser API doesn't but we need both, so we create a DataView at the start of an encode/decode and pass the Uint8Array and the DataView and each encode/decode function can choose which one to use.

It is also worth considering that dataView passed may not be a view for the same buffer, which code seems to assume but does not verify that is the case.

I guess you could pass a DataView instance to the top-level encode/decode invocation to do this, but you know, garbage in, garbage out.