Major performance problem with std.array.front()

[w0rp]

On Sunday, 9 March 2014 at 19:40:32 UTC, Andrei Alexandrescu 
wrote:
>> 6. Take into account ASCII and maybe other alphabets? Should 
>> be as
>> trivial as .assumeASCII and then on you march with all of 
>> std.algo/etc.
>
> Walter is against that. His main argument is that UTF already 
> covers ASCII with only a marginal cost (that can be avoided) 
> and that we should go farther into the future instead of 
> catering to an obsolete representation.
>
>
> Andrei

When I've wanted to write code especially for ASCII, I think it 
hasn't been for use in generic algorithms anyway. Mostly it's 
stuff for manipulating segments of memory in a particular way, 
like as seen here in my library which does some work to generate 
D code.

https://github.com/w0rp/dsmoke/blob/master/source/smoke/string_util.d#L45

Anything else would be something like running through an 
algorithm and then copying data into a new array or similar, and 
that would miss the point. When it comes to generic algorithms 
and ASCII I think UTF-x is sufficient.