Feature request: some API for parsing from a string/buffer about crystal-uvarint

[freitagbr]

Suggestion: reimplement as a struct (a Varint should be immutable). Allow instantiation from an Int, and Array, or Bytes. Add encoded and decoded methods that return the UInt64 and Bytes representations, respectively.

[nfischer]

If we're returning UInt64 from an instance, how about we override .to_i and its similar functions? .to_u64 would be the one which actually returns the UInt64.

This might be a good opportunity to use templates for metaprogramming. That keeps the code base simple to maintain, but very flexible and extensible.

Also, it makes sense to provide a .to_s(base : Int32). Then Multihash can use .to_s(16) for serializing. If we want to expose the Bytes, we can add a method for that specifically.

[freitagbr]

This should be closed by #2. For multihash, we can use the method .hexstring for the desired behavior.

[nfischer]

@freitagbr this wasn't fixed in #2 (see the title & description). #2 addressed some of the extra features mentioned in comment 1 & 2. Actually, #4 is a duplicate of this.

[freitagbr]

Oh, you're right. I will mark #4 as a duplicate. PR #5 should fix the remaining issues here.

[freitagbr]

This should be closed by #5.