alt Hacker NewsThe concept of lifetimes was invented long before Rust borrow checker was even "scratched on paper." Of course, people who understand what they are they doing have known about these concepts for decades and have built their architectures around them. However, Rust borrow checker is much stricter than that. You have to build your architecture around the fact that you can't have more than one mutable reference at a time, and your data structures have to be represented as directed, acyclic graphs, etc. If you have to break all these rules by using a lot of unsafe because it's too difficult to represent your system within Rust safe subset using only value semantics and borrow-checked references, etc, then why use Rust instead of C++, C, or Zig?
Where did I say Rust's borrow checker predates lifetimes?
I'm saying you have to be as meticulous as a borrow checker. Not as strict, of course, but you have to analyze each pointer, how and when it's used, and then cross-reference with the documented lifetime.
Just like thread safety existed before Rust made it explicit. Now you don't need to investigate if data is thread safe if it's `Send + Sync`.
This is a job humans suck at and compilers excel at. With some caveats. There will be edge cases that will need to be manually proven.