The Case Against Autodecode

[Walter Bright via Digitalmars-d]

On 6/2/2016 3:23 PM, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
> On 06/02/2016 05:58 PM, Walter Bright wrote:
>>  > * s.balancedParens('〈', '〉') works only with autodecoding.
>>  > * s.canFind('ö') works only with autodecoding. It returns always
>> false without.
>>
>> Can be made to work without autodecoding.
>
> By special casing? Perhaps.

The argument to canFind() can be detected as not being a char, then decoded into 
a sequence of char's, then forwarded to a substring search.

> I seem to recall though that one major issue with
> autodecoding was that it special-cases certain algorithms. So you'd need to go
> through all of std.algorithm and make sure you can special-case your way out of
> situations that work today.

That's right. A side effect of that is that the algorithms will go even faster! 
So it's good.

(A substring of codeunits is faster to search than decoding the input stream.)