Added function that marshals message into a given byte buffer.

[altenhof]

Should alllow us to pool byte buffers across multiple calls.

[crewjam]

Thanks for your PR. This looks like it should be named WriteTo and implement the io.WriterTo interface, eh?

[altenhof]

Unfortunately, WriteTo is already taken, defined in stream.go, which, btw, does use Writer and not WriterTo as an argument.

So, what about MarshalTo(w io.Writer)?

[crewjam]

I'm hesitant to use a "wrong" name for a function that has a standard defined interface like WriterTo.

Perhaps a solution is to change the existing stream format WriteTo() to a different name, or attach it to a helper struct. That way the function you wrote can be (correctly) named WriteTo. I think that makes the object behave closer to the way people expect.

[altenhof]

I'm not sure what the "right" name for such a function would be, but maybe I just shortly recap what my initial idea was:

I'm using the library within a component that does "log forwarding", i.e. get log messages in syslog format, transforms them and then forwards them to another syslog endpoint. As I'm expecting fairly heavy loads (several thousand msg/sec), I wanted to have a way to "reuse" bytes.Buffer instances (using sync.Pool) when it comes to forwarding the messages. Right now, MarshalBinary allocate a new bytes.Buffer for every call.

So, I'm not that much looking for a WriteTo function that could write to a io.Writer interface, but for a MarshalTo marshalling the message into a bytes.Buffer. I would have done it "myself", but then I would have to duplicate most of the code in marshal.go.

So how shall we proceed?

[altenhof]

Any update on this?