2 ms·

So it's true that technically the primitive type is str, and indeed it's even possible to make a &mut str though it's quite rare that you'd want to mutably borr

So it's true that technically the primitive type is str, and indeed it's even possible to make a &mut str though it's quite rare that you'd want to mutably borrow the string slice. However no &str is not "an alias for &&String" and I can't quite imagine how you'd think that. String doesn't exist in Rust's core, it's from alloc and thus wouldn't be available if you don't have an allocator.

zozbot234 1y ago
str is not really a "primitive type", it only exists abstractly as an argument to type constructors - treating the & operator as a "type constructor" for that purpose, but including Box<>, Rc<>, Arc<> etc. So you can have Box<str> or Arc<str> in addition to &str or perhaps &mut str, but not really 'str' in isolation.