- In lots of places, I've discovered that Phobos did UTF decoding (thus murdering performance) when it didn't need to. Such cases included format (now fixed), appender (now fixed), startsWith (now fixed - recently), skipOver (still unfixed). These have caused latent bugs in my programs that happened to be fed non-UTF data. There's no reason for why D should fail on non-UTF data if it has no reason to decode it in the first place! These failures have only served to identify places in Phobos where redundant decoding was occurring.
With all due respect, D string type is exclusively for UTF-8 strings. If it is not valid UTF-8, it should never had been a D string in the first place. In the other cases, ubyte[] is there.
