Comment by paledot

String/str are both valid UTF-8 by definition, though. Plain ol' piles of bytes in Rust are generally represented by Vec<u8>/[u8].

Rust could have done better in naming, but a definite design goal of the language (for better and worse) is to not make things that are complicated for the compiler appear simple to the user. Which unfortunately results in:

    String/str
    CString/CStr
    OsString/OsStr
    Vec<u8>/[u8]
    AsRef<str>
    Cow<`a, str>