add single-argument (de)serialize methods operating on vectors of bytes

[aplavin]

Basically, for convenience: I find myself copy-pasting these methods whenever I load/store Julia serialized data as part of another data format like parquet or sql database. They natively store byte arrays, and would be nice to have these (de)serialize methods going directly back and forth between Julia objects and byte vectors.

Another neat usecase is to quickly copy-paste a Julia object between different Julia sessions (repls, notebooks, remote, ...):

# in session 1:
x |> serialize |> base64encode
# copy the resulting string

# in session 2:
x = "<paste string here>" |> base64decode |> deserialize

[JeffBezanson]

Looks good. Would be nice to add doc strings to these.

[LilithHafner]

LGTM. I've also wanted this functionality. There's no other plausible implementation of the deserialize(::Vector{UInt8}) method, and the return type Vector{UInt8} seems reasonable for the serialize(value) method.

Should go to triage as it is technically an expansion of public API? The specific question I'd ask is: "Is Vector{UInt8} the right return type for serialize(value)?"

[JeffBezanson]

I think we can just merge this. What is the mac build failure here about?

[adienes]

is there a reason the docs enforce specifically a Vector{UInt8} from serialize rather than an iterator over UInt8 ? it's quite rare one needs indexed access to serialized data, right?

for deserialize it makes sense to not promise more than is implemented, but I don't think these need to be perfectly symmetric

[adienes]

Suggested change

	!!! compat "Julia 1.13"
	!!! compat "Julia 1.14"

[adienes]

Suggested change

	This method is available as of Julia 1.13.
	This method is available as of Julia 1.14.