I wrote pretty basic rust stuff and had to use lifetime syntax quite a bit. If you are just forcing deep copies all the time, you might not see it often, but if you're just going to deep copy everything always, you’re probably going to be better off with another language to be honest as you’re tossing away much of the benefit of using a language like rust anyway.
I rarely use lifetimes and I don't deeply copy everything.
This tool is probably the fastest in its class - does this code look like having a lot of lifetimes, cryptic syntax or deep copying?
There was one fundamental "aha" moment for me when it clicked: move semantics.
Once I learned it, suddenly 99% of stuff became simple (including making async quite nice really, contrary to popular HN beliefs).
You can cherry pick all you want, although I would generally agree that “top level” executables will most likely bump against lifetimes far less frequently than libraries, frameworks, modules etc.
I would also generally agree that a single pass through the official book should mostly be enough to be able to read and understand the op.
Therefore I cited the core of the program as well. It also does a bunch of non trivial async processing there.
I’ve written at least two other non-toy Rust programs and I haven’t hit “lifetimes everywhere” problem there either. I guess the most lifetime related problems stem from trying to program the Java/Python/JS style in Rust - from overusing references and indirection. If you model your program as a graph of objects referencing each other then I can imagine you have a hard time in Rust.
