[zozbot234]

> If in 2012 you read a similar article explaining borrow checking in academic terms you would have thought Rust would be unusably hard, which is not.

Ironically, Rust was unusably hard prior to the late-2018 edition. So now your academic article has to explain both the baseline borrow checker and non-lexical lifetimes, a vast increase in complexity.

[gignico]

Your statement contradicts itself. It was unusable hard before non-lexical lifetimes, but they vastly increased the complexity? Then maybe what’s complex for compiler writers to implement can make the user’s life easier by lowering the complexity of their code?