Use more chars instead of strings

[wooster0]

And it improves things like gsub(' ', "").

[jkthorne]

where you able to measure any performance increase or is this just to make intent clearer?

[Sija]

@wontruefree See benchmark in #5882

[wooster0]

Can we maybe merge this now?

[bararchy]

@straight-shoota, @RX14 or @sdogruyol
it seems to passed @bcardiff and seems overall like a good addition, can we have this merged?

[straight-shoota]

It's fine by me. But I'm not a core member ;)

[wooster0]

This is ready for a review I think. @jhass @mverzilli

[wooster0]

@ysbaddaden can we merge this please?

[jwoertink]

@RX14 This might be a good one to add in to 0.27.

[j8r]

What's blocking for the merge?

[straight-shoota]

@r00ster91 Could you rebase on master to make sure it's all good?

[wooster0]

There are a bunch of GC Warning: Failed to expand heap by 16777216 bytes warnings in the test_linux32 CI fail but it seems to be unrelated.

[Sija]

Ouch, CI is going rogue again :/

Multiple:

• GC Warning: Finalization cycle involving 0xf9ff990
• GC Warning: Failed to expand heap by 16777216 bytes

Then:

Unhandled exception in spawn: Error writing to socket: Broken pipe (Errno)
  from src/socket.cr:77:13 in 'unbuffered_write'
  from src/io/buffered.cr:123:14 in 'write'
  from src/io.cr:853:5 in 'write_byte'
  from src/io/buffered.cr:156:14 in 'write_byte'
  from src/char.cr:767:9 in 'to_s'
  from src/io.cr:184:5 in '<<'
  from src/http/client/response.cr:63:5 in 'to_io'
  from spec/std/http/client/client_spec.cr:13:7 in '->'
  from src/fiber.cr:255:3 in 'run'
  from src/fiber.cr:72:34 in '->'
  from ???

Aaand a timeout, triple strike!

---

@r00ster91 Did you rebase on current master?

[wooster0]

@Sija Yes, I did. I did exactly this on the branch:

git fetch origin
git rebase origin/master

[asterite]

Suspicious... I'm not sure it's rebased against master. Did you git pull in master first?

[j8r]

It's isn't rebased. Don't forget to git checkout master; https://github.com/crystal-lang/crystal then go to your branch and rebase, then git push -f

[straight-shoota]

No, this branch is based on c163a85 which is 4 days old and doesn't include #7397.

[wooster0]

Oh, no I didn't do git pull before pushing. I just checked out this branch, fetched and rebased and then force-pushed it here. I'm pretty sure it is rebased. I've also updated my fork (4 days ago).

[Sija]

AFAIK git pull shouldn't be needed here...