To be fair, even for someone who is comfortable in Rust, the example is definitely on the rather confusing side of the language. (Not entirely surprising--it's

To be fair, even for someone who is comfortable in Rust, the example is definitely on the rather confusing side of the language. (Not entirely surprising--it's a bug about a soundness hole in the language, which invariably tends to rely on overuse of less commonly used features in the language). In particular, explicit use of lifetimes tends to be seen as somewhat more of a last resort, although the language requires it more frequently than I like. Furthermore, the soupiest of the syntax requires the use of multiple layers of indirection for references, which itself tends to be a bit of a code smell (just like how in C/C++, T * tends to be somewhat rare).