This prevents us from needing a sv suffix, and potentially reduces the
need to run generic code for a single character (as contains,
starts_with, ends_with etc. for a char will be just a length and
equality check).
No functional changes.
Classes reading and writing to the data heap would communicate directly
with the Heap object, and transfer ByteBuffers back and forth with it.
This makes things like caching and locking hard. Therefore all data
persistence activity will be funneled through a Serializer object which
in turn submits it to the Heap.
Introducing this unfortunately resulted in a huge amount of churn, in
which a number of smaller refactorings got caught up as well.
