If you want a function to do that, you're absolutely at liberty to write one. You could even write a zero-overhead wrapper around the references to allow for o

If you want a function to do that, you're absolutely at liberty to write one. You could even write a zero-overhead wrapper around the references to allow for overloading. Rust won't let you implement Add<&str> for &str though, you'd need to use your wrapper. I wouldn't recommend doing that, though, and not just because of "surprise" allocations: in my experience writing Rust code, it's fairly rare to need to add strings together. I'm much more likely to use a format macro.