Merge strategy

[mkitti]

I think we should merge #1010 and #1013 as soon as possible. I'll follow #1010 with some changes based on StaticStrings.jl.

Merge #1021 directly without #1022. We can also merge #1023 as that is just a test fix. We can keep discussing #1024 if needed.

I will work on writing tests for #1008 so we can merge that.