[bcrosby95]

> I actually think it would be a perfectly good language without all the lifetime stuff, with lots of improvements over C++ (destructive move for a start).

I'm not sure what you mean by this exactly. Do you mean Rust would be a perfectly good language without its safety guarantees? Because it can't have them without lifetimes. It could instead have GC like Go/Java/etc, but now it's a GC language.

Lifetimes aren't a feature of the language. They are the implementation details for a couple features of the language. It's how it gets there. And I don't think Rust would have anywhere near the interest it has without those features.