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0 pointsalpaca1285y ago0 comments

What I tend to stumble over is how String and &str each have some methods and features that the other lacks, e.g. concatenation. Which of course makes sense with basic understanding of string slices, but sometimes I can't shake the weird feeling that I'm cloning some String unnecessarily.

And I just wish generic type parameters wouldn't have to be propagated through all types touching them.

That said I'm really happy with how it develops and Rust comes with many little details that I sorely miss in other languages. Thanks for all the effort.

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gamegoblin5y ago

The methods on `String` should be a strict superset of the methods on `str` because `String` dereferences to `str`, thus `String` gets all of the `str` methods for free.

If you're familiar with say, `Vec<u8>` and `[u8]`, `String` and `str` are basically the same except they are contractually valid UTF bytes. So just like you can `push` and `extend` to a `Vec`, you can do the same to a `String`.

With regard to generic type parameters, if you want to code in Java or Go style, you can use dynamic dispatch trait objects to remove type parameters.

brundolf5y ago

> The methods on `String` should be a strict superset of the methods on `str` because `String` dereferences to `str`

I've found that sometimes this doesn't happen automatically (at least when passing as an argument; maybe not when calling methods). i.e., you have to explicitly call .as_str() in some situations. Even as someone who's comfortable with the String/&str distinction and moderately familiar with Rust, it's not clear to me where this is and isn't necessary. The compiler just tells me when I make the wrong guess.

aldanor5y ago

Maybe read a bit on Deref: https://doc.rust-lang.org/std/ops/trait.Deref.html

Any time you have a &String reference, it triggers coercion to &str.

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