Major performance problem with std.array.front()

[Walter Bright]

On 3/6/2014 7:59 PM, bearophile wrote:
> Walter Bright:
>
>> I understand this all too well. (Note that we currently have a different
>> silent problem: unnoticed large performance problems.)
>
> On the other hand your change could introduce Unicode-related bugs in future
> code (that the current Phobos avoids) (and here I am not talking about code
> breakage).

This comes up repeatedly as justification for D trying to hide the UTF-8 nature 
of strings that I discussed upthread.

To my mind it's like trying to pretend that floating point doesn't have roundoff 
issues, integers have infinite range, memory is infinite, etc. That has a place 
in other languages, but not in a systems/native language.