Rust Essentials - Second Edition

Arrays, vectors, and slices

Suppose we have a bunch of alien creatures to populate a game level, then we probably want to store their names in a handy list. Rust's array is just what we need:

// from Chapter 4/code/arrays.rs 
let aliens = ["Cherfer", "Fynock", "Shirack", "Zuxu"]; 
println!("{:?}", aliens); 

To make an array, separate the different items by commas and surround the whole with [ ] (rectangular brackets). All items must be of the same type. Such an array is of fixed size (it must be known at compile time) and cannot be changed; it is stored in one contiguous piece of memory in stack memory.

If the items have to be modifiable, declare your array with let mut; however even then the number of items cannot change:

let mut aliens = ...