And sometimes you need to interact with an OS that uses ASCII for strings, and sometimes one that uses UTF-8, and sometimes one that uses UCS-2, and maybe (if y

And sometimes you need to interact with an OS that uses ASCII for strings, and sometimes one that uses UTF-8, and sometimes one that uses UCS-2, and maybe (if you've been very bad and need to use an IBM Z) to one that uses EBCDIC or something even worse. C defines a string as just a bunch of bytes that represent some text (no embedded NULLs). Rust defines a string (in general) as just a bunch of bytes that represent some text in some encoding specified by the specific string type. So even without the stack vs heap distinction you'd still have tons of string types, because there are tons of string encodings.