[oconnor663]

Lifetimes and destructors aren't as directly related as it might feel at first. Destructors of course are a thing that happens at runtime, and sometimes the order in which things get destructed has important observable side effects. (Maybe it prints something, or maybe you care about the order locks are released in. Apart from memory safety questions.)

Lifetimes really have no runtime effect at all. They only exist to prove things about the program at compile time. So all the types and function signatures get assembled together, and then a constraint solver gets run over the whole thing. As long as it returns "yes a solution exists", then no ones really cares about the details of the solution. The benefit of non-lexical lifetimes is to weaken the constraints on the system, so that code that used to appear invalid now appears valid. But I believe it will have no effect on any existing code. (There's a Rust compiler reimplementation somewhere that doesn't even check lifetimes, since you can always use the standard compiler in testing.)