Flattening Rust’s learning curve

>For instance, why do you have to call to_string() on a thing that’s already a string?

It's so hard for me to take Rust seriously when I have to find out answers to unintuitive question like this

I’m not sure why it’s counterintuitive that &str and String are different things. Do you also find it counterintuitive in C++ that std::string is different from const char* ? What about &[u8] and Vec<u8> ?

Better analogy is std::string_view vs std::string

Nah. &str is const char* exactly. It's as primitive as types in rust get.

Nope. `&str` includes the length of the slice, which `const char*` does not. `std::string_view` is the proper analogy.

Another difference is that &str is guaranteed to be utf-8, whereas const char* can be any encoding (or no encoding).