At any given moment, there will exist at least one feature of Rust that is suffering temporary workarounds as a result of flux in the implementation. Strings are such a feature at the moment, and ugly code like the above is the interim solution. It will look nicer for 1.0. :)
Great: I wasn't sure if it was a feature of the framework or the language! Like many others here, I'm looking forward to playing with Rust in earnest once it's a little more mature.
