How do I implement Copy and Clone for a type that contains a String (or any type that doesn’t implement Copy)?

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Copy

Copy designates types for which making a bitwise copy creates a valid instance without invalidating the original instance.

This isn’t true for String, because String contains a pointer to the string data on the heap and assumes it has unique ownership of that data. When you drop a String, it deallocates the data on the heap. If you had made a bitwise copy of a String, then both instances would try to deallocate the same memory block, which is undefined behaviour.

Since String doesn’t implement Copy, your enum cannot implement Copy either because the compiler enforces that Copy types are composed only of Copy data members.

Clone

Clone merely provides a standard clone method, and it’s up to each implementor to decide how to implement it. String does implement Clone, so you can put #[derive(Clone)] on your enum.

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