What is the difference for the ordinary string and &str ?

[Kiddinglife]

Hey, seems like all the features in this library can be achieved via the use of rust string and &str slice. So anything I missed? Thx.

[xfbs]

Hey, sorry I only saw your issue right now.

There are two main differences:

• When you clone() a String, you have to allocate new memory and copy the contents of the string over. Whereas when you clone() an ImString, you're just incrementing a reference count, but not duplicating the data. The data inside an ImString can be cheaply shared.
• The difference between an ImString and a &str is that you cannot easily store a &str in, say, a struct or a hashmap and pass it around. It has a lifetime attached to it. Since you cannot have self-referential structs, you cannot have, say a struct that contains a String and a bunch of string slices (&str) pointing to it. That is what this crate solves: you can use an ImString like a &str, but it does not need a lifetime.

I hope that answers your questions.