If you write Rust like this (insisting that structs always fulfill 'static) you will end up unnecessarily cloning memory way more than you would in a GC'ed lang

If you write Rust like this (insisting that structs always fulfill 'static) you will end up unnecessarily cloning memory way more than you would in a GC'ed language. In GCed languages strings get allocated once when you need them, get referred to wherever you want, however many times you want (with no new calls to the allocation subsystem), and are freed once when you don't need them anymore, with minimal thought or intervention on the programmers part. Rust is absolutely not like this at all. I agree with the overall idea that people exaggerate the difficulty of Rust, but come on, this is an exaggeration way too far in the other direction.