In Rust, [u8; N] and &[u8] are both primitive types, and not abstractions. It's possible to create an abstraction around either (the former even more so now with const generics), but that's not necessary. It's also possible to use "extension traits" to add methods, even to existing and built-in types[1].

I'm not sure about a 3 byte big endian integer. I mean, that's going to compile down to some combination of shifting and masking operations anyway, isn't it? I suspect that if you have some oddball binary format that needs, this it will be possible to write some code to marshal it, that compiles down to the best possible asm. Godbolt is your friend here :)

[1]: https://rust-lang.github.io/rfcs/0445-extension-trait-conven...

I agree then that in Rust you could make something consistent.

I think there's no need for explicit shifts. You need to memcpy anyway to deal with alignment issues, so you may as well just copy in to the last 3 bytes of a zero-initialized, big endian, 32bit uint.

https://gcc.godbolt.org/z/jEnsW8WfE

That's just constant folding. Here's what it looks like when you actually need to go to memory:

https://gcc.godbolt.org/z/9qGqh6M1E

And I think we're on the same page, it should be possible to get similar results in Rust.