[mtlmtlmtlmtl]

One of the habits I struggled to get rid of at first was the habit of making lots of things in structs refs for no reason, where it would be typical kn C for C reasons.

This led to a lot of unnecessary friction with the borrow checker while I was still getting to understand it.

Once I started always asking myself "does this really need to be a ref?", things became much easier. And this in turn revealed itself as a useful rule of thumb for keeping coupling between subsystem in check.

Then I was doing some C work and I realised I was asking the same question to myself about pointers too. And I found it could often reduce cognitive load down the line, because I'd end up in much fewer situations where I'd have to figure out "who should free this, and when?".

That's when I realised this cognitive load of keeping the borrow-checker happy was always there in C too. It was just more diffuse, and invisible until it blew up in my face. And when it did it was in the form in nasty runtime problems, not a helpful compiler error that happened before the code was even checked in.