Wow this is a really excellent and comprehensive overview.

Just to calibrate my own intuition, would anyone who was mostly unfamiliar with these concepts be able to weigh in on how much of this post they grokked?

This is great, thorough, and taught me a lot about Rust and not just it's Strings.

One nit is to explain what the hell the lightning bolts mean in your code samples. I interpreted it as the assertions failed and got really mixed up when reading half way down the page.

Actually, I'm still confused, and on mobile. > The potentially surprising thing here is that the resulting string is "WÖRLD", instead of "WöRLD". > ... > Since we cannot change which memory location the slice spans, ..., we can generally not perform this operation.

These seem to conflict. Maybe a typo. Maybe it's me. Maybe it's maybelline.

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