Binary blobs with intelligent serialization.
Where Vec<u8> always serializes as an array of bytes, this crate provides serialization functions
which try to make an intelligent decision about how to serialize a byte vector based on the
serialization format.
For binary formats like bincode, the array-of-bytes
serialization works great: it is compact and introduces very little overhead. But for human-readable
types such as json, it's far from ideal. The text encoding
of an array introduces substantial overhead, and the resulting array of opaque bytes isn't
particularly readable anyways.
base64-bytes uses the is_human_readable
property of a serializer to distinguish these cases. For binary formats, it uses the default
Vec<u8> serialization. For human-readable formats, it uses a much more compact and conventional
base 64 encoding.