> It seems true to me that working with the Rust borrow checker is eventually fruitful, but there is a micro-case where working with lifetimes seems like a lot

> It seems true to me that working with the Rust borrow checker is eventually fruitful, but there is a micro-case where working with lifetimes seems like a lot mental overhead with little gain, compared to a built-in garbage collector available in Lisp. Fwiw, my shop uses Rust in some basic web applications and lifetimes are not used in day to day programming. It heavily depends on what you're doing. Are there some applications/libraries/etc where we're using lifetimes? Definitely. But for us they're very niche. AND, perhaps most importantly, even in those you _still_ don't have to. If you're okay with the performance trade off, which we most certainly are (we have some Python usage for example), adding in basic reference counting can be a no-brainer tradeoff. I actually quite like lifetimes. I have some side projects where i use them extensively. But just like standard Generics they're a tool you can use, but that doesn't mean you always should. Just like accepting a `s: &str` instead of `s: S) where S: AsRef<str>` can make your life cleaner and simpler, using `Rc<Foo>` can equally simplify. Just my 2c :) [1]: because we like it, no other reason.. really, a team of ~30.