Using Rust daily since ~2016 here. I'm assuming that by "writing code that needs lifetime semantics" you mean "writing code that needs explicit lifetimes", sinc

Using Rust daily since ~2016 here. I'm assuming that by "writing code that needs lifetime semantics" you mean "writing code that needs explicit lifetimes", since all code in Rust has some lifetime semantics going on. If I've misunderstood then please clarify. Lifetimes are one tool in the toolbox, and using them is absolutely not an anti-pattern. Being able to define and use explicit lifetimes is a really powerful tool that allows you to safely share data in ways that can be tricky and error-prone to do in some other languages. For example, a deserialiser could be passed a reference to a buffer (&'a [u8]) and return a struct where some fields are &'a str which are just bytes borrowed from that buffer. You could then perhaps trim() them - returning another &'a str which just points to a smaller slice of that same buffer, and pass them off to other parts of your program - potentially even pass them to an async function that you await on, which could run in another thread - and the explicit lifetimes mean your code will fail to compile if the buffer can be dropped before the string is.