To the OP - why should creating uninitialized references with static lifetimes be easy? That is a recipe for undefined behavior - borrows aren't pointers, if yo

To the OP - why should creating uninitialized references with static lifetimes be easy? That is a recipe for undefined behavior - borrows aren't pointers, if you want a pointer to be zero initialized, then use a pointer. If you want safe access to that pointer then wrap it in a struct with an accessor method