[PAUSED] Tell Reductionist to return the count as bytes

[maxstack]

Description

Add an option to the API request instructing Reductionist to return the count as bytes instead of a vector of int64's
It's been made optional so it can be switched on and off, just in case this isn't the best solution - but we can try!

We can restore the vector of int64's with the following, which uses numpy int64's so considering we're pushing data back into numpy this will hopefully improve efficiency:

count = list(np.frombuffer(count, dtype=np.int64))

The PR adds this conversion such that it's always done - might be better for those with more PyAS knowledge to optionally run this only when count is needed to save gobbling up more memory unnecessarily.

Closes #316

Hopefully!

@valeriupredoi makred this PR as PAUSED since #323 (comment) - we should keep the branch active and up to date as much as possible though.

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Checklist

• This pull request has a descriptive title and labels
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[codecov]

Codecov Report

✅ All modified and coverable lines are covered by tests.
✅ Project coverage is 93.16%. Comparing base (ab85d39) to head (f5050ad).

Additional details and impacted files

@@            Coverage Diff             @@
##             main     #323      +/-   ##
==========================================
+ Coverage   93.13%   93.16%   +0.02%     
==========================================
  Files           7        7              
  Lines         685      688       +3     
==========================================
+ Hits          638      641       +3     
  Misses         47       47              

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[valeriupredoi]

@maxstack thanks very much for implementing the option - the option itself works a treat! But the use of it doesn't bring upon any improvement in performance, in face, @varsiha-sothilingam and myself have noticed that the old implement with binary stream popped into a list by cbor is a lot more memory efficient than it used to be, so we left this option out for now. Of course, once we start seeing used cases that really need some memory improvements, we'll look at using the option again, but for now I am keeping it off. Cheers again, Max 🍻