[zozbot234]

> Users coming from GC languages are surprised Rust can't make things "live long enough".

If you really need a general 'long enough' strategy and can't just pick a sensible place to drop the object statically, that's what Rc<> and Arc<> provide - built from the ground up via refcounting.

> Users coming from C are surprised that references aren't like pointers.

For good reason. General "pointers" don't have a simple, compositional semantics that preserves modularity (Yes, I know about separation logic; that's not practically reasonable in a language like Rust - or C/C++ for that matter - that's not built around expressing complex logical invariants in code); references do. A piece of code that uses pointers in non-reference-like ways must be understood as a unit. Which is why Rust strives to reduce such code to a minimum, marked with a scary "unsafe" keyword.