main reasons behind this:
- make adding/removing tags cheap
- make adding/removing fields cheap
- make parsing cheaper
- make parse -> decorate -> write out bytes metric flow much faster
Refactor serializer to use byte buffer
* Allow numeric and non-string values for tag_keys.
According to the go documentation the JSON deserializer only produces these
base types in output:
- string
- bool
- float64
- nil
With this patch bool, float64 and nil values get converted to a string when
their field key is specified in tag_keys. Previously the field was simply
discarded.
* Updated handling of nil for passing tests.
The automated tests are less than trivial to reproduece locally for me,
so I hope CircleCI wonn't mind...
* Updated changelog entries with PR and issue links.
This constitutes a large change in how we will parse different data
formats going forward (for the plugins that support it)
This is working off @henrypfhu's changes.