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Sometimes I see examples of vimscript code, which uses / instead of " to delimit strings.
Are there any side effects to this, or is it always possible to do that? And what is the advantage of using slashes rather than double quotes?
One example is here: http://vimhelp.appspot.com/syntax.txt.html#E849 (scroll up a few lines)
The examples you are referring to are not examples of strings, but of patterns. A pattern may be delimited by any character (except alphanumeric characters), although the most usual one is /. This does not seem to be very well documented, but I found it described under :h E146, which reads as follows:
Instead of the '/' which surrounds the pattern and replacement string, you can use any other single-byte character, but not an alphanumeric character, '\', '"' or '|'. This is useful if you want to include a '/' in the search pattern or replacement string. Example:
:s+/+//+
Strings, on the other hand, are either literal strings, e.g. 'this is a literal string', or "expression" strings, e.g. "this is an expression string". See :h expr-string and :h literal-string. The difference is that the expression string accepts special characters that are parsed, e.g. special keys such as "\<cr>", while literal strings are taken as is, except that double quotes are treated as a single quote.
I don't think there are side effects. Sometimes it can be useful because you don't need to escape same sign that would be used inside. So if you have to search for "foo", using " as container, you would have to do it like this: ... start="\"foo\"", where with / (or any other): ... start=/"foo"/
This is explained in the same document but a bit lower: here
:echo /foo/it won't work. But in the substitutions commands for example you can use different characters (see my question here) if you scroll some more lines you'll see that the help also provides an example with+as patterns delimiters.