Re: multibyte strings & bucket-of-bytes efficiency under 1.9.0

After reading this thread, and looking at the the title, let me make
the humble suggestion that it might be fruitful to focus on the
"bucket-of-bytes" issue separately from "stringness."  Do buckets of
bytes really need to look like strings, support regexes, etc?  An
alternative might be to use an array of bytes, but there are obvious
inefficiencies there.

What if there were a new primitive object type introduced, something
like T_BYTEARRAY

The idea comes from Smalltalk which has a few basic object types,
Smalltalk objects normally consist of some number of object pointers
(i.e. the equivalent to a VALUE)  but there's also a special type of
byte-indexable object which is an array of bytes, i.e. the elements
can only be integers between 0..255.  Bytearrays can be efficiently
implemented both in terms of space and speed.

Of course there would be ways to convert a String to and from a
ByteArray, and perhaps a variant of Array#pack which would produce a
ByteArray instead of a String...

Probably a bit more work than what's been proposed so far on this
thread, but perhaps worth some discussion?

-- 
Rick DeNatale

My blog on Ruby
http://talklikeaduck.denhaven2.com/