[kentonv]

> in C++ you can of course always fall back to raw pointers for efficiency, while retaining well defined (e.g. class/scope based) lifetimes to avoid bugs.

This is certainly what I'd recommend wherever possible. It's OK to give Foo a reference to Bar as long as Foo is declared after Bar in some common scope, so will be destroyed first. If you find it's overly difficult to prove this relationship then you need to refactor your code or use some reference counting.

And then of course Rust actually checks the relationships for you.