[atoav]

I agree that this is a stupid choice. Yet I wrote many reliable and performant programs without using lifetime specifiers once. One of those programs was a text tokenizer that got second place on performance and was only beaten by a highly optimized piece of assembler.

This is not nothing if you ask me. Rust is a language within which your shifty naive program will still outperform many other solutions, all while being reliable as heck if you wield the type system the right way.

The only thing that I dislike about it is that certain code becomes unreadable. As this article says it often becomes unreadable for a reason — a reason which you would just not think about in other languages — but unreadable is still unreadable.