I think having felt pain with std::string, you would implicitly understand and enjoy working with the two string types in Rust. They do everything it sounds like you've been doing manually and inconveniently in your C++ code.
Agreed. I'd also make an analogy to C++ where you sometimes must hop between std::string and char*'s with ambiguous lifetimes. Not to mention various custom string types that any big app will have (ex. one that internally exploits jemalloc's allocator optimizations (i.e. exposing block overages), or does rope-style allocation, or intern's into a shared table, or whatever).
