4 ms·

I hadn't heard of rodata before, but based on a quick Google, I think what you're describing is similar to Cow<str>. I can't speak to the reasons why this wasn'

• cesarb 6y ago
  It's probably the same reason why IIRC the default Rust String does not have a "small string optimization": it would add a lot of unpredictable branches. And it would be even worse, since unlike the "small string optimization", even small mutations which don't change the size would have to allocate when the original was read-only.
  • pornel 6y ago
    Another problem is that `&str` is more than just "read-only". It also tracks lifetime to prevent use-after-free. A universal owned-or-readonly-borrowed String would be unsafe without also adding reference counting or GC to keep the borrowed-from string alive.