First off, major kudos and this is very very cool work. It's also a great article and really, everyone should go read it. Beyond "just" better string arrays, m

First off, major kudos and this is very very cool work. It's also a great article and really, everyone should go read it. Beyond "just" better string arrays, my favorite side effect of this is efficient NaN support in string arrays. The article talks about this a lot, but I had already started this comment before fully reading the article :p I mean, sure, the old approach was object arrays, and you can do it there because each element is an independent object, but they're super inefficient. This both makes things efficient _and_ has a really cool side effect of supporting something that had become common partly as an accident of the old object array approach - NaNs in arrays of strings. This is really really really useful work and it's _super_ cool!!