'offset' parameter in seek and others is "string" but docs use a number

I’m trying to work out the typing of the offset part of the seek call parameter: The documentation at https://kafka.js.org/docs/consuming#a-name-seek-a-seek shows this to be a number, which intuitively makes sense.

But, looking at the code https://github.com/tulios/kafkajs/blob/cef2676e32e773bbb2fbc0ebca51321dd03af70c/src/consumer/consumerGroup.js#L250-L261 it is annotated as string, which seems to go through the code base.

1. Which is “correct?”
2. And, of course: If this is a string, should be a string-that-can-be-converted-to-a-number, or is it completely opaque?

[ThisIsMissEm]

We could also use javascript’s new BigInt type: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Reference/Global_Objects/BigInt

It’s currently in stage 3 of ECMAScript specification, which means that it’s being implemented in various javascript engines. It is available for Node.js >= 10

[JaapRood]

FYI: in case you might think you will run out of numbers, so need a string, but also what to do offset arithmetic, consider using long. It’s what KafkaJS does to do so and gives all the basic operators you might need.