Proposal - Typed Array

[YOU]

Similar concept to Javascript's Typed array - https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Typed_arrays

Possible BNF grammar for Typed arrays

element ::= ...
    | "\x13" e_name sub_type sub_elements   #Typed array
sub_type ::= "\x01" | "\x08" | "\x09" | "\x0A" | "\x10" | "\x11" | "\x12"
sub_elements ::= int32 (byte*)

What do you think?

[Dwight Merriman]

a few thoughts 

the link cited talks about the goal being to access raw data.  as bson has the BinData type that is already covered i think.  however there are other potential benefits of the concept of course.

it would be a bit awkward to implement in some libraries, as "BsonElement's" are a notion and references to them can readily be passed around.  however if we left out the type in each of the sub-elements, it is then a different thing that requires conversion perhaps to a regular BsonElement at some point in the library when users do certain things.

i think the encoding of arrays is a bit awkward independent of the type thing: bson arrays are also bson documents, and each array element has a field name ("0", "1", ...).  the advantage is arrays can be treated as documents, but there is some space and scanning efficiency wasted in the process.  i think this happened because in javascript arrays are objects.  but i could imagine in some future version of the bson spec, that arrays have a different encoding than that.

in the meantime, note that you could just implement them yourself, by using BinData and a user defined subtype which for you means "typed array".  then you stick whatever you want in there, and you have a couple of helper functions that push and pull the data easily.  of course it isn't standardized then, but it is still bson.