I'm not the author, but from my perspective: Yes. Dramatically. Non-lexical lifetimes eliminated the most common cases where the compiler was just wrong. Of

I'm not the author, but from my perspective: Yes. Dramatically. Non-lexical lifetimes eliminated the most common cases where the compiler was just wrong. Of course you still need to think about lifetimes, and sometimes warp your program around them. However, it is now much less common for that thinking to arrive at "The compiler is wrong; how can I convince it of that?"