We will be discussing these at length in future chapters, but typed arrays are ways of representing arbitrary bytes in the system. This allows us to work with lower-level functionality, such as encoders and decoders, or even working on the byte streams of a fetch call directly instead of having to work with converting blobs to numbers or strings.

These usually start out with an ArrayBuffer and then we create a view over it. This can look like the following:

const arrBuf = new ArrayBuffer(16);
const uint8 = new Uint8Array(arrBuf);
uint8[0] = 255;

As we can see, we first create an array buffer. Think of this as a low-level instance. It just holds raw bytes. We then have to create a view over it. A lot of the time, we will be utilizing Uint8Array as we need to work with the arbitrary bytes, but we can utilize views all the way up to BigInt. These are usually utilized in low-level systems such as in 3D canvas code, WebAssembly, or raw streams from the server.