[skippyboxedhero]

Agree, that is the purpose of unsafe but there is a degree of irrationality there, which I am guilty of, about using unsafe in Rust. I also worry about unsafe leaking if I am using raw pointer on a struct...but stdlib uses a lot of unsafe code, so I should be too.

I think the issue that people have is that they come into Rust with the expectation that these problems are actually solved. As I said, it would be nice if lifetimes weren't so impossible to use.

The compiler isn't doing the thinking if you have to change your code so the compiler is happy. The problem with Rust is too much thinking: you try something, compiler complains, what is the issue here, can i try this, still complain, what about this, etc. There are specific categories of bugs that Rust is trying to fix that don't require the changes that Rust requires in order to ensure correctness...if you use reference counter, you can have more bugs.