Note: You probably want to use https://github.com/treeform/flatty,
unless you want a library that works on a Buffer type using manual
allocation instead of stdlib string.
This is a helper package to make it easier to copy (potentially nested) Nim objects via procedures that only work on flat datatypes.
Typically, whenever Nim objects are used that either contain string
or seq types, anything involving copyMem or otherwise procedures
that require the data to be flat in memory are out.
By using asFlat (possibly combined with toString) you can
convert a Nim object into a Buffer (or string). Using flatTo[T] you convert
a Buffer back to a T. fromString can be used to reconstruct a
Buffer from a string created via toString.
This is based on a bespoke library used in nimhdf5 that deals with
strings and seqs (any variable length data) in a special way related
to how HDF5 stores its data. When I needed the functionality for
flatBuffers I just quickly turned that nimhdf5 submodule into this
library. At the time I had forgotten flatty is even at thing.