[tialaramex]

Starting by defining the non-owning slice references, rather than the owning container types is such a massive advantage that it's very telling that Stroustrup didn't get this right in his language.

Today Bjarne will insist that the correct understanding of ownership and lifetimes was always inherent in his language and if you point out that it basically only warrants a brief mention in his early books about the language he'll say that the newer books have much more about this, as if that's not a confession...

Because &str (the non-owning reference to a slice of UTF-8 encoded text) in Rust is so ubiquitous, it's completely reasonable in Rust to use anything from the simple standard library owning String type, which is literally a growable array, Vec<u8> plus the promise about UTF-8 encoding, through to text which lives only on the stack as a re-interpreted array, or at the other extreme a raw pointer-sized short-string optimisation https://crates.io/crates/cold-string -- where unless it fits inline the string is length-prefixed on the heap like Pascal. All these approaches fit different niches and since a mere reference to the string is the same for all of them they're compatible. In C++ you will run into too many problems and regret trying.

Edited: Correct that String lives in the stdlib -- it isn't baked in to the core language because your tiny embedded system may not have an allocator to go around creating fancy growable arrays, but it still might want the non-owning string slice, &str which truly is in the core language.