Make sure we only collect binary encoded strings in our buffer.

[arthurschreiber]

@charliesome this should fix the issue encountered by you.

---

This changes the internal Buffer class to convert all strings written into it to have a binary/raw encoding instead of whatever encoding the string originally had. When the strings get written to the wire their encoding is lost (or transmitted separately in V2 of the protocol) anyway.

---

Non-scientific benchmarks:

Before:

$ bundle exec ruby bench/bench.rb 
       user     system      total        real
BERT tiny  0.010000   0.000000   0.010000 (  0.006823)
BERT small  0.060000   0.000000   0.060000 (  0.057645)
BERT large  0.290000   0.110000   0.400000 (  0.406172)
BERT complex  1.150000   0.010000   1.160000 (  1.150710)

After:

$ bundle exec ruby bench/bench.rb 
       user     system      total        real
BERT tiny  0.010000   0.000000   0.010000 (  0.007411)
BERT small  0.060000   0.000000   0.060000 (  0.064392)
BERT large  0.280000   0.030000   0.310000 (  0.308900)
BERT complex  1.270000   0.000000   1.270000 (  1.273539)

[carlosmn]

It looks like String#b does not exist in the default ruby on Travis (which seems to be 1.9.3 right now). Do you reckon it'd be worth adding a Travis file and testing in 2.0 upwards (or whatever the supported version is currently?)

[arthurschreiber]

@charliesome already did that in the production+travis branch: https://github.com/github/bert/blob/production%2Btravis/.travis.yml

So once all these things get merged together, everything should be working fine. 🤞

[haileys]

Thanks @arthurschreiber!