[zozbot234]

> Suppose I wanted to try learning Rust again; is there a resource for someone with a lot of (hobbyist) programming experience, and experience with low level languages and memory management (e.g. C), but not complicated low-level languages, like C++?

The official Rust book is targeted at novices with some programming experience. There's also Rustlings https://github.com/rust-lang/rustlings for a more practical approach.

> When I tried to work with Rust a few years ago I found it utterly impenetrable. I just had no idea what the borrow checker was doing, did not understand what the error messages meant, and honestly couldn't even understand the documentation or the tutorials on the subject

The compiler diagnostics have improved a lot over time. It's quite possible that some of the examples you have in mind return better error messages.

> in Rust it's always been a nightmare for me. I just really don't grok the "lifetime" concept at all, it feels like I'm trying to learn academic computer science instead of a programming language.

Academic computer science calls lifetimes "regions", which is perhaps a clearer term. It's a fairly clean extension of the notion of scope that you'd also find in languages like C or Zig. It's really not that complex, even though the Rust community sometimes finds it difficult to convey the right intuitions.

[bscphil]

Fair enough, I do need to have a look at the book again, although that was one of the sources I found impossible to understand a few years back. I think there's a temptation to talk about lifetimes in extremely abstract terms under the assumption that the reader already understands and appreciates the abstraction. I, however, was never able to build up an intuition for it, and so tutorials that didn't explain what was happening in detail sailed over my head.