Well, the byte arrays are in, for good and evil. We had to wrap them in a counterpart to StringBuffer, but backed by byte[] instead, since all that explicit allocation and deallocation was way unperformant.
Of course, we aren’t seeing any performance benefits from this right now. The problem is that there is still many places that use IRubyObject#toString to get at the contents. That operation is very expensive right now, so gem installs are slower, for example. But we have good hopes on improving the situation, and many parts of the codebase have become much clearer without the need to do String-to-byte[] and byte[]-to-String all over the place.
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