The complicated lifetime stuff is pretty rare to run into unless you are doing some tricky things, like custom zero copy parsers or data structures or whatever.

The complicated lifetime stuff is pretty rare to run into unless you are doing some tricky things, like custom zero copy parsers or data structures or whatever. The most important tricks I've learned are: - Return types should usually be owned values, input types should often be references (or AsRefs). "Be explicit in what you return, and general in what you accept". - If I'm going to be pointing into an array, its often easier to just pass around indexes instead.