The advantages of various types of strings in Rust
New Rustacians usually ask why Rust has many types of strings. I don't know the original intention. Anyways, it has some advantages as follow:
It minimizes the language core. Rust core has only str. String, OsString, CString are in the standard library, which is not a part of the language core.
Programmer can control performance. For example, &str refers to a byte slice so it should be fast, while String is a wrapper of Vec. String should have more performance penalty from heap memory allocation.
OsString and CString improve interoperability with other programming languages and operating systems. Rust can manipulate C-style strings directly without converting them to native Rust strings. OsString is also similar.
String conversation has a performance penalty. Also sometimes string conversation is not obvious. Some systems don't even use Unicode or other standards.
The alternative of having too many types is treating everything as a byte slice. However, type checking doesn't work well with too few types.