Are we doing that now?

In any case, this would only introduce the problem of not knowing whether or not the pred supplied is the default pred, which is important in this case (speed up for array types). This is particularly true in the context of statsWith being called by other algorithms, which themselves pass "a == b" to startsWiths anyways.

I've been somewhat thinking about working on this "issue", but it is a more involved change (completely outside of startsWith's scopes). At the end of the day, it is costly development, and doesn't really by us much anyways...