Yes, Rust will super-efficient, blazingly-fast, and memory-lean. But it's not nearly as good at rapid prototyping as, say, Ruby, so you'll have to temper your expectations.
String manipulation in Rust is currently lacking while we work on the API. We also strictly enforce that all strings are UTF-8, so while this gives us great confidence that we're future-proof it adds a whole lot of difficulty in implementing a fast and correct means to work with strings.
Can you elaborate why UTF-8 makes things harder? Is it because 1-byte no longer means one character? So, something like calculating a string's length is also tricky. Is that it?
Also, where can I read about the general direction the string manipulation API is going to take?
String manipulation in Rust is currently lacking while we work on the API. We also strictly enforce that all strings are UTF-8, so while this gives us great confidence that we're future-proof it adds a whole lot of difficulty in implementing a fast and correct means to work with strings.