This is one of those things that I wish people would speak more carefully about. I've seen it in every programming language community I've participated in, so it's not a language-specific thing, but... one should not say "language X does not do a thing" when they mean "language X's standard library does not do a thing". That the "language" doesn't do a thing should be reserved for the cases where the language itself really does preclude some particular thing for some reason. Otherwise the relatively inexperienced programmers end up coming away with some really weird mental models of what programming languages can and can not do, just like here. Of course Rust qua Rust can store strings like this, it's basically built for things like this. Any mental model of Rust that thinks Rust qua Rust can't do this is a weird mental model of Rust.