Lots of low hanging fruit in Phobos

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On Thursday, 6 March 2014 at 21:26:45 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
> A major goal for D in the short term is to reduce reliance in 
> Phobos on the GC. I was looking at std.string last night, and I 
> noticed a couple things:
>
> 1. The inputs are constrained to being strings. This is overly 
> restrictive, the inputs should be InputRanges.
>
> 2. The outputs should be a range, too. In fact, the string 
> functions should become algorithms. Then they won't need to 
> allocate any memory at all.
>
> The existing functions should not be removed, but perhaps 
> rewritten as wrappers around the algorithm versions.
>
> I've found that rewriting traditional code, which is what 
> std.string is now, in terms of algorithms is a bit 
> mind-bending. But it's well worth it, and fun.
>
> So who wants to step up? Don't have to do the whole thing in 
> one go, just pick a function and do that one.

Seems like a good idea to reduce memory usage wherever possible, 
but I thought that the reason std.string exists (and duplicates 
some functionality that exists elsewhere) is to provide 
string-specific versions that were either optimized specifically 
for strings, or have completely different functionality due to 
working with strings.