Mastering Rust - Second Edition

Slices

Slices are a generic way to get a view into a collection type. Most use cases are to get a read only access to a certain range of items in a collection type. A slice is basically a pointer or a reference that points to a continuous range in an existing collection type that's owned by some other variable. Under the hood, slices are fat pointers to existing data somewhere in the stack or the heap. By fat pointer, it means that they also have information on how many elements they are pointing to, along with the pointer to the data.

Slices are denoted by &[T], where T is any type. They are quite similar to arrays in terms of usage:

// slices.rsfn main() {    let mut numbers: [u8; 4] = [1, 2, 3, 4];    {        let all: &[u8] = &numbers[..]; println!("All ...