handling big integers

[sshutovskyi]

As of now this library handles integers over 2^53 as numbers which causes them to loose precision. The safer way would be to convert them to strings or buffers. Do you plan to add this to this package? In our project we extend your library to handle varint64 in this way, do you need a pull request with the similar implementation?

[mourner]

I'm not sure... I would probably use something like https://github.com/indutny/bn.js to handle big numbers, but I wouldn't want to pull in such a big dependency for a rare use case like this. Perhaps we could do away with just mentioning this in docs and providing a JS workaround in a gist?

[mourner]

Out of scope for this library for now, keeping it simple.

[rdominy]

Now that Node.js 10.4+ supports BigInt any chance of revisiting support for this? I'm working with a 3rd party service that unfortunately using int64 to send IDs which doesn't work well trying to stuff into a 32 bit JavaScript int.

[UlysseM]

In order to be backward compatible, it might be worth looking at:
https://developers.google.com/protocol-buffers/docs/reference/java/com/google/protobuf/DescriptorProtos.FieldOptions.JSType

JS_NORMAL would be the current behavior.
JS_NUMBER would parse and return the number as a bigint.
JS_STRING would parse and return as a string

The way compiler would need to make calls to the new functions writeVarintFromBigint / writeVarintFromString / readVarintFromBigint / readVarintFromString.

writeVarintFromString and readVarintFromString could be implemented by calling the Bigint variant and doing a toString value of it.