Char Type in Rust

They're created using single quotes.

That's interesting. So this is clearly distinct from a string slice &str, which is created using double quotes. I see that they're separate types. Therefore 'a' != "a", which is a bit of a mind-bender.

Could you explain a little more about the difference between them? I recall that a string literal (as an example of a string slice) is a pointer to a hardcoded location within the binary. What's the deal with char?

So a char is always 4 bytes in size and therefore differs from the String or &str representation. From the docs:

let v = vec!['h', 'e', 'l', 'l', 'o'];

// five elements times four bytes for each element
assert_eq!(20, v.len() * std::mem::size_of::<char>());

let s = String::from("hello");

// five elements times one byte per element
assert_eq!(5, s.len() * std::mem::size_of::<u8>());

Notice that a list of chars take up much more memory than a String of the same content. I believe it's probably useful to use char over String when there's a need to run certain calculations/methods on the given character, as char's API is quite rich.