At the very least some basic things like collation and normalization should be part of the String class. I think character counting would also be a useful thing

At the very least some basic things like collation and normalization should be part of the String class. I think character counting would also be a useful thing (and given the ASCII-art formatting of error messages in rust, it's presumably part of the compiler's code already although there are plenty of bits of compiler code that aren't exposed through stdlib like the ability to take a string like \u{e0) and convert that to á.