I’m not a java programmer, but I think the equivalent to str would be char[]. However the ergonomics of rust for str isn’t there for char[], so java devs probably use String everywhere.
Nope, crucial difference between Java’s char[] and Rust’s is that the latter is always a pointer to an existing section of memory. When you create a char[], it allocates a new section of memory (and then you get a pointer to that).
One thing that they might be able to do, is to optimize it in the JVM, akin to Rust’s Cow.
Basically, you could share the same section of memory between multiple String instances and only if someone writes to their instance of that String, then you copy it into new memory and do the modification there.
Java doesn’t have mutability semantics, which Rust uses for this, but I guess, with object encapsulation, they could manually implement it whenever a potentially modifying method is called…?
