Wrong Ways To Create Strings

I’m on my way back from RustLab 2026, where I gave a lightning talk about all the ways to create a String in Rust that don’t involve String::new. The talks were not recorded, so I decided to write it up as a blog post. Collect Some Characters One of the most obvious ways to create a string without calling String::new is to collect some characters into a string: let ferris: String = ['f', 'e', 'r', 'r', 'i', 's'] .into_iter() .collect(); Alternatively, you can start with the UTF-8 bytes: let ferris = String::from_utf8(vec![102, 101, 114, 114, 105, 115]) .unwrap(); Derive Debug If we derive Debug for an enum, we can format a variant as a string. Note that debug output isn’t a stable serialization format, so this just happens to work for this particular string. #[allow(non_camel_case_types)] #[derive(Debug)] enum Mascot { ferris, } let ferris = format!("{:?}", Mascot::ferris); Use a CString This is another very obvious one: we can use CString to create a string with a NUL terminator,…

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