Row key: string or binary (byte[])?

[Roland Hänel]

Is there any effort ongoing to make the row key a binary (byte[]) instead of
a string? In the current cassandra.thrift file (0.6.0), I find:

const string VERSION = "2.1.0"
[...]
struct KeySlice {
    1: required *string* key,
    2: required list<ColumnOrSuperColumn> columns,
}

while on the current (?) SVN
https://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/cassandra/trunk/interface/cassandra.thriftit
reads:

const string VERSION = "4.0.0"
[...]
struct KeySlice {
1: required *binary* key,
2: required list<ColumnOrSuperColumn> columns,
}

Thanks for enlightening me. :-)

Greetings,
Roland