Not my experience, fwiw. Rust does a great job of handling the mental overhead (am I allowed to mutate this? who owns this? what is the contract for that?) for me.
Exactly. Compiler-enforced ownership and lifetimes _dramatically_ reduces the mental overhead of memory management compared to C. It also saves time from having to run things under Valgrind and ASAN just to make sure I didn't mess up. The extra time spent getting Rust code to compile is considerably shorter than the time required to debug something Valgrind found.
While definitely an improvement over raw pointers, ultimately C++'s smart pointers still fall short in several ways: they can be null, there's no lifetime checking for references (so you can still use after free), there's no object freezing (so you can still have data races), etc.
Exactly. Compiler-enforced ownership and lifetimes _dramatically_ reduces the mental overhead of memory management compared to C. It also saves time from having to run things under Valgrind and ASAN just to make sure I didn't mess up.