Support Bigint

[firasdib]

Add support for BigInt so we can use high resolution timers and values.

[SimenB]

PR very much welcome!

Ref #223 (comment)

[firasdib]

@SimenB Supporting versions prior to bigint would make the code quite tedious, I reckon. If we can limit ourselves to node >=10, it'd be easier. Then we can just change the internal representation to bigint everywhere, and send it as a string to prometheus.

[SimenB]

Nah, just check typeof BigInt when serialising (to strip trailing n, isn't that enough? Dropping node 8 is not really an option

[firasdib]

@SimenB There's a few Number.isFinite here and there as well. I'd recommend keeping the library lean, without too many ifs and typeofs that'll take up valuable time in the event loop.

[SimenB]

I'll be impressed if you can measure time spent on an if in anything but a synthetic microbenchmark :) That's not really an issue

[firasdib]

@SimenB Perhaps. I'd still argue that the correct path is to bump the major version number, and work entirely with bigint instead.

[SimenB]

That's not gonna happen until next year, 8 is LTS and there's not big benefit to dropping it early. When we do drop it we can probably rewrite to use BigInt all over

[siimon]

Yeah, we need to support all current official node versions.

[popomore]

Node 10 is LTS now, It's time to use BigInt by default in this client. We can transform Number to BigInt for compatible.

[SimenB]

Node 8 is also LTS and does not support BigInt. It'll be EOL in January 2020 though, at which point we can revisit

[mario-sangar]

Is there any news on this matter? I want to set a gauge value with a high value and I'm limited to the size of number on JS, I need to use a BigInt or other representation to hold this value

[drozdziak1]

Boarding the bandwagon 👀

[SimenB]

PR welcome - our current minimum node version is 10 👍

[eL1x00r]

lol bump