[jack_clayto]

Hi author here, Mojo has lifetimes and references! But they're in their infancy and being worked out in the standard library, before we document how to use them for external users. We need to iterate on the syntax and usability.

Your point about hash tables is true, we have an open ticket to improve this in the stdlib. There are a lot of things that can be improved in the stdlib since we've added features like references, we have dedicated engineers for this now.