Major performance problem with std.array.front()

[Dicebot]

I don't like it at all.

1) It is a huge breakage and you have been refusing to do one 
even for more important problems. What is about this sudden 
change of mind?

2) It is regression back to C++ days of 
no-one-cares-about-Unicode pain. Thinking about strings as 
character arrays is so natural and convenient that if 
language/Phobos won't punish you for that, it will be extremely 
widespread.

Rendering correctness is very application-specific but providing 
basic guarantees that string is not completely broken is useful.

Now real problems I see:

1) stuff like readText() returns char[] instead of requiring 
explicit default encoding

2) lack of convenient .raw property which will effectively do 
cast(ubyte[])

3) the fact that std.string always assumes unicode and never 
forwards to std.ascii for 
http://dlang.org/phobos/std_encoding.html#.AsciiString / ubyte[]