[gibbonsrcool]

I am also interested in OCaml, so thanks for sharing this. I’ve heard it’s higher level than Rust and has GC. I’ve spent most of my career using Java and after a few weeks of Rust I love many things about it but feel managing lifecycles and ownership might be too much for me.

[speed_spread]

Hang in there. Lifecycles manage themselves, mostly. You can write large, complete applications without handling a single explicit lifetime. The borrow checker becomes second nature once you get the hang of it. Don't feel bad for using Rc/Refcell/Clone everywhere. Your code will still be faster than it would have been in most other languages.

[KMag]

The thing about GC is that it doesn't free you from having to think about lifecycle management, it just frees you from having to write it down. I've seen a few memory leaks in Java programs due to people not putting enough thought into when a piece of data is no longer needed.

Granted, most programs don't run long enough/process enough data for poor lifecycle hygiene to become noticeable in GC'd languages.