Slice and String Literals

Most slices start life as a literal. Both kinds below produce an ordinary 16-byte slice header; they differ only in where the elements are stored.

Slice Literals

A slice literal [e1, e2, …] allocates the elements on the stack and returns a slice header pointing to them. The element type is inferred from the values, and length is the number of elements:

let primes = [2, 3, 5, 7, 11];    // int32[]; primes.length == 5
let flags  = [true, false, true]; // bool8[]; flags.length == 3

Every element must have the same type — a slice is a sequence of one element type, unlike a tuple.

String Literals

A string literal produces a char8[] slice whose data pointer addresses the string bytes in the .rodata section of the binary:

let greeting = "Hello";   // 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 header, so there is no trailing \0. When calling C, which expects null-terminated strings, account for this difference explicitly.

Because a string is just a char8[], it supports the same indexing and iteration as any other slice.

See Also

• Slices — the slice overview and memory layout
• Dynamic Slices and Fixed-Size Arrays — the two slice forms
• Character Types — the char8 element type behind strings