Hi all, I a morning hacking session Sebastian and I implemented a new simple type in mspec: byte
In contrast to int and uint this doesn't have a size, so it's more like the "bit" which has a fixed size. We decided to introduce this for situations in which we want to transport data and not have it interpreted. The problem was that in order to have it map to a "byte" in Java, the mspecs needed to use "int 8", while in go and c a "uint 8" would have been a better match. Now a byte maps to that type that typically is used in that particular language. So for Java it maps to a byte (8 bit signed integer) and in C and Go it maps to an 8 bit unsigned integer). This change has absolutely no effect on existing drivers, unless you change the mspec to use the new type. Sebastian is currently working on a shorthand to auto map: "[array byte ...]" directly to a byte[] (or []byte) so we even can get rid of reading bytes into lists. Chris
