title: Is there a fast parser for date
body: <p>For datetimes <a href="https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/fasttime/index.html" rel="noreferrer">fasttime</a> provides very fast parsing to POSIXct</p>
  
  <pre><code>library('fasttime')
  library('lubridate')
  library('microbenchmark')
  
  # parse character to POSIXct
  Sys.setenv(TZ='UTC')
  test &lt;- rep('2011-04-02 11:01:00',1e4)
  microbenchmark(
    test1 &lt;- fastPOSIXct(test),
    test2 &lt;- fast_strptime(test,format='%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S'),
    test3 &lt;- as.POSIXct(test, format='%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S'),
    test4 &lt;- ymd_hms(test),
    times=100)
  Unit: microseconds
                                                         expr       min        lq      mean    median         uq       max
                                   test1 &lt;- fastPOSIXct(test)   663.123   692.337  1409.448   701.821   712.4965 71231.585
   test2 &lt;- fast_strptime(test, format = "%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S")  1026.342  1257.508  1263.157  1264.928  1273.8145  1366.438
      test3 &lt;- as.POSIXct(test, format = "%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S")  9865.265 10060.450 10154.651 10145.551 10186.3030 13358.136
                                       test4 &lt;- ymd_hms(test) 13990.206 17152.779 17278.654 17308.347 17393.6625 22193.544
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>Is there something equivalent for dates <code>Date</code>, the <a href="https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/lubridate/index.html" rel="noreferrer">lubridate</a> package provides some parser but the fast one (fast_strptime) cast dates to POSIXct (not meant for dates)
  Casting POSIXct to Date is too long. </p>
  
  <p>Given how quick it is to parse to POSIXct I would think there should be something as quick to Date</p>
  
  <p>Is there a fast packaged alternative ?</p>