Thanks for the great reply! (And sorry for that other complicated question… )

Knowing that &str is just a reference, makes sense when they are limited to compile time. The compiler naturally knows in that case when it’s no longer used and can drop the string at the appropriate time. Or never dropped in my case, since it’s const.

Since I’m reading files to serve webpages, I will need Strings. I just didn’t get far enough to learn that yet… and with that ‘Cow’ might be a good solution to having both. Just for a bit of extra performance when some const pages are used a lot.

For example code, here’s a function. Simply take a page, and constructs html from a template, where my endpoint is used in it.

pub fn get_full_page(&self, page: &Page) -> String {
        self.handler
            .render(
                PageType::Root.as_str(),
                &json!({"content-target": &page.endpoint}),
            )
            .unwrap_or_else(|err| err.to_string())
    }

Extra redundant context: All this is part of a blog I’m making from scratch. For fun and learning Rust, and Htmx on the browser side. It’s been fun finding out how to lazy load images, my site is essentially a single paged application until you use “back” or refresh the page. The main content part of the page is just replaced when you click a “link”. So the above function is a “full serve” of my page. Partial serving isn’t implemented using the Page structs yet. It just servers files at the moment. When the body is included, which would be the case for partial serves i’ll run into that &str issue.