I think lifetimes are the part of Rust that people see as ugly. I recently wrote the following lines of code: struct Parser<'a, 'b, T> { value: &'a [T]

I think lifetimes are the part of Rust that people see as ugly. I recently wrote the following lines of code: struct Parser<'a, 'b, T> { value: &'a [T], inner: InnerParser<'a, 'b> } impl<'a, 'b, T> for Parser<'a, 'b, T> { fn parse<T: Into<String>>(value: T) -> &'static str { ... } } and the equivalent code in Scala: class Parser[T] { var value: List[A] = Nil var inner: InnerParser = Nil def parse(value: String): String = ... } of course, those programs are not semantically equivalent, but you can clearly see that the Scala version is the more elegant of the two. I can't think of any other way that you could syntactically express lifetimes, but I can see why people would see Rust as ugly.