Idea: allow matching against byte[] instead of String

[hyperpape]

Matching against a byte[] is likely to have lower overhead than matching against a String, as the compiled code would no longer contain as much functionality inlined from String#charAt. If that's true, then it might sometimes be good to have a version of the code that operates on byte[] instead of String.

There are two cases you can imagine here:

1. A caller might already have a byte[], and want to match against it.
2. It might be true that even if you already have a String, it's faster to convert to a byte[]

I have no intuition whether the second possibility is ever true.

Since the current version of the code only cares whether it's getting data from a String when it calls String#charAt, the internal implementation would probably not be that complicated. We might have to support an alternate version of the Pattern interface that accepts byte[] (I don't think we'd want to include the byte[] based methods on the standard interface?).