> It just feels wrong to go around hiding everything that's going on from the borrow checker and moving the errors to runtime. But maybe that's what you need to do to prototype things in Rust without a lot of pain?
There's some truth to that, but I think the real problem is when some part of the state of your program looks like a graph with loops and cycles (not a tree). It's possible that it only looks that way during prototyping, but I think it's more likely that once it starts looking that way, it's gonna stay that way. In that case, "hiding" your lifetimes from the borrow checker is really about making your borrows shorter, which is how you can manage a graph without violating the no-mutable-aliasing rule.
There's some truth to that, but I think the real problem is when some part of the state of your program looks like a graph with loops and cycles (not a tree). It's possible that it only looks that way during prototyping, but I think it's more likely that once it starts looking that way, it's gonna stay that way. In that case, "hiding" your lifetimes from the borrow checker is really about making your borrows shorter, which is how you can manage a graph without violating the no-mutable-aliasing rule.
https://jacko.io/object_soup.html