String Literals

A string literal is the most common way a slice appears directly in source. Unlike an array literal [a, b, c] — which produces an owning array T[N] — a "..." literal produces a slice: a Slice<char8> whose data pointer addresses the string bytes stored in the read-only data section of the binary.

let greeting = "Hello";   // Slice<char8>; greeting.length == 5

Two details follow from this representation:

• Length is the byte count. length counts bytes, not characters, and does not include any terminator.
• Strings are not null-terminated. Rux strings carry their length in the slice header, so there is no trailing \0. When calling C, which expects null-terminated strings, account for this difference explicitly.

Because a string is a Slice<char8>, it supports the same indexing and iteration as any other slice, and it can be passed to any function that takes a Slice<char8>.

func Greet(name: Slice<char8>) {
    Print("Hello, ", name);
}

Greet("Rux");   // the literal is a Slice<char8> slice into rodata

See Also

• Slices — the slice view type and its memory layout
• Arrays — where the [a, b, c] literal form belongs
• Character Types — the char8 element type behind strings
• Indexing and Iteration — working with the characters of a string