stream/fs: support writing ArrayBuffers

[trevnorris]

Right now not much will happen if an ArrayBuffer is passed to fs.write. Should be trivial to implement, and will make people happy.

[trevnorris]

No one has spoken up wanting this functionality. Since the change is tiny and additive I'm going to punt on getting this in before v0.12 release. If the community speaks out then I'll reconsider.

[YurySolovyov]

is it for fs.write only, or for other methods too? title says it is also for streams...

[trevnorris]

The idea is that any input that supports buffers would also support
arraybuffers.

[YurySolovyov]

if its really that trivial to implement, why not? it will help with some html5 apis in future

[bnoordhuis]

if its really that trivial to implement, why not?

Lack of time / man power. (High quality) patches are welcome.

[MarcoPolo]

+1

This would be immensely helpful for writing huge array buffers into files (something I'm doing in cryptic.io ) I wouldn't mind helping implement this if I get some direction.

[bnoordhuis]

@MarcoPolo If you need technical direction, join #libuv on irc.freenode.org and ping me or Trevor.

[dominictarr]

what are the pro/cons of ArrayBuffers vs buffers?
will they be able to be passed directly to libuv, or is this just convenience

[trevnorris]

@dominictarr Buffer is Node's little bit of awesome. It's the default way of passing data in and out of streams. libuv doesn't work directly with either of them. You'd have to rip out the char* first, which can be done with either.

[jasnell]

@trevnorris ... was there ever any progress on this?

[domenic]

@jasnell opened nodejs/node#1826 for the more general issue

[jasnell]

Ok, given that I'll close this issue here as it's extremely unlike to land here.