[pcwalton]

> That felt like a lot of boilerplate to abstract between str and [u8]. Is there a better way to solve that problem?

This doesn't have anything to do with large vs. small standard libraries, because all of these string types are defined in libstd.

[JoshTriplett]

libstd defines varying amounts of string manipulation and abstraction for those string types, though.

I'd love to see additional support for handling bytestrings in libstd, to make it easier to write code that handles both &str and &[u8].