Strings

C char * is powerful and vague.

It may mean mutable bytes, a NUL-terminated string, ASCII text, or simply the argument type required by a C API. The caller also has to know who frees the memory, whether it contains \0, what encoding it uses, and where the length comes from.

Rust does not put all of that into one type. It splits the common cases:

one byte: u8
bytes: &[u8] / Vec<u8>
UTF-8 text view: &str
owned UTF-8 text: String
C string view: &CStr
owned C string: CString

This article builds the first boundary: bytes, text, and C strings are different things.