Major performance problem with std.array.front()

[Vladimir Panteleev]

On Saturday, 8 March 2014 at 00:22:05 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
> We should think about a way to have our cake and eat it, too.

I think a good place to start would be to have a draft 
implementation of the proposal. This will allow people to try it 
with their projects and see how much code it will really affect. 
As I mentioned here[1], I suspect that certain valid code that 
used the range primitives will continue to work unaffected even 
after a sudden switch, so perhaps the "deprecation" and "error" 
stage can be replaced with a longer "warning" stage instead.

This is similar to how git changed the meaning of the "push" 
command: it just nagged users for a long time, and included the 
instructions to switch to the new behavior early (thus squelching 
the warning) or permanently accepting the old behavior. (For our 
case it is adding .representation or .byCodepoint depending on 
the intent.)

[1]: 
http://forum.dlang.org/post/dlpmchtaqzrxxylpmiwh@forum.dlang.org