I think you might be surprised how rare explicit lifetime annotations actually are in Rust code. But, to the point: It precisely isn’t “noise”. It’s important

I think you might be surprised how rare explicit lifetime annotations actually are in Rust code. But, to the point: It precisely isn’t “noise”. It’s important information that any competent C++ developer will immediately look for in documentation, or worse, by analyzing the code. It’s not distracting - it’s essential. Aside: I’m very confused by your assertion that C++ has been reducing boilerplate. It feels like every couple of years there’s another decoration that you need to care about. The only reduction I can think of is defaulted/deleted constructors and assignment ops? But that feels self-inflicted, from a language design perspective.