For now, this reference is a best-effort document. We strive for validity and completeness, but are not yet there. In the future, the docs and lang teams will work together to figure out how best to do this. Until then, this is a best-effort attempt. If you find something wrong or missing, file an issue or send in a pull request.

Textual types

The types char and str hold textual data.

A value of type char is a Unicode scalar value (i.e. a code point that is not a surrogate), represented as a 32-bit unsigned word in the 0x0000 to 0xD7FF or 0xE000 to 0x10FFFF range. A [char] is effectively a UCS-4 / UTF-32 string.

A value of type str is a Unicode string, represented as an array of 8-bit unsigned bytes holding a sequence of UTF-8 code points. Since str is a dynamically sized type, it is not a first-class type, but can only be instantiated through a pointer type, such as &str.