The spec talks about "empty string" and other languages like C#
return a zero length string and not null.
This is useful because when moving from proto2's "required string"
to a proto3's plain string we will be guaranteed that we
never get a null pointer.
The tradeoff is adding a special case to the library but avoiding
a lot of null checks in the calling code.
The current code is already special casing "" in pack_string.
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