Goodbye, Node.js Buffer
TBH I prefer Buffer as an abstraction. Too bad it didn't make it into native JS standard. I can't think of many use cases in JS land were Uint8Array, Uint16Array, Uint32Array, Int8Array would be absolutely necessary. Seems more useful for perf optimizations. For WebAssembly? Surely a plain array of numbers can be used in most cases. The main use case for Buffer IMO is to convert  between different formats like Base64, hex or for sending raw binary data over a transport; ultimately we just need an object to represent binary. It doesn't seem appropriate for a high level language like JS to concern itself with the details of CPU architecture which warrant thinking of binary in terms of 8-bits, 16-bits or 32-bits in the first place. As an abstraction, it's rather arbitrary to treat these numbers as special. It really seems to come down to a marginal performance optimization.