A compatibility layer is provided to ease migration.

Add asBytes() and asChars() methods to array classes to reinterpret-cast to bytes / chars, since this happens all the time and is otherwise a huge pain.

Use the new methods in a bunch of places.

The project file still only compiles a test binary, but it should be easy to separate out a library project from here.

Thanks again to Bryan Boreham <bjboreham@gmail.com> for much help getting this working.

For portions currently copyright by Kenton (most of it), transfer copyright to Sandstorm Development Group, Inc. (Kenton's company).

The license change is practically meaningless, as MIT and BSD 2-clause are legally equivalent. However, the BSD 2-clause license is sometimes confused for its ugly siblings, BSD 3-clause and BSD 4-clause. The MIT license is more immediately recognizeable for what it is.

Rémy Blank and Jason Choy (the two non-trivial contributors) are on record as approving this change:

https://groups.google.com/d/msg/capnproto/xXDd2HUOCcc/gbe_COIuXKYJ

Define new KJ constants for min/max integer values and inf/nan, then remove all use of numeric_limits.

Refactor compiler binary into a multi-tool with sub-commands like 'compile' and 'decode'.  The latter dynamically decodes binary input to text based on a provided schema file.

Mass rename 'reference' -> 'pointer'.  Been meaning to do this for a while -- all the documentation talks about 'pointers', not 'references'.

Replace most CAPNPROTO_ASSERTs with the new logging/error macros.  Also add a SYSCALL macro and use it.  Also add commentary.

Update implemented pointer format to match docs:  Don't store field count in struct pointers because it isn't needed.  Instead extend data and pointer section sizes to 16 bits, which should be enough for anyone.  Also, store offsets from the end of the pointer rather than the beginning, because this makes it possible for them to be zero, which compresses better.  In particular, the root reference will always have a zero offset, so this will shave a byte off of very small packed messages.