[swift-evolution] Strings in Swift 4

[Zach Waldowski]

On Wed, Jan 25, 2017, at 04:54 PM, Ben Cohen wrote:
> I’m normally all in favor of the “don’t give people features, or they'll
> use them too much” argument but in this case I don’t think it applies.

That's not what I'm calling for at all. In fact, ContiguousArray and co.
are a great example of the problem I'm having here. After reading,
learning, profiling, and tuning, more than once on my teams has a
correct use of ContiguousArray been shot down by "why isn't this just
Array?" during code review. I've more than once had to babysit an angry
coworker or walk a confused student through why they have a variable of
type ArraySlice and not Array.

I cannot emphasize more thoroughly that I want all this power (and
more!) to exist in the stdlib, but, and don't take this the wrong way,
the concern that I'm voicing is the team must balance the desire for a
perfect, beautiful, complete String model and how, in practice, it's
actually gets used — a set of possibilities which includes "not at all"
and many varieties of "incorrectly".

Best,
  Zachary Waldowski
  zach at waldowski.me