Undocumented buffer.***Slice() methods

[jasnell]

Buffer has long had a number of undocumented methods like Buffer.prototype.asciiSlice() and Buffer.prototype.utf8Slice()... The question is: should these be documented as part of the public API? Or should public access to them be slowly deprecated and removed?

[anonrig]

I'm +1 on deprecating all non public APIs on buffer.

[mscdex]

-1 I strongly believe we should not remove them. These encoding-prefixed methods (including -Write()), while undocumented, can provide significant speed improvements when you know the encoding ahead of time, allowing you to skip encoding name parsing and various other checks.

If it's any consolation, they could be added to the documentation with the additional recommendation that toString() and write() be used in most/general cases (especially when the encoding is variable) or something to that effect.

[jasnell]

I'm fine with documenting them. We just shouldn't leave them public and undocumented