Ah, I get your question now, I thought you were talking about const functions. Well, const values in Rust are funny things, they're not linked into the executab

Ah, I get your question now, I thought you were talking about const functions. Well, const values in Rust are funny things, they're not linked into the executable, they don't have an address or a lifetime. That confused me too for a while. They're purely a shortcut for a value expression, not that different from a #define in C. Statics, in contrast, have a storage location and a static lifetime. Compare: const CONST_STRING: String = String::new(); static STATIC_STRING: String = String::new(); fn main() { let x: String = CONST_STRING; // fine let y: String = STATIC_STRING; // error: cannot move out of static item }