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In this post, I want to make two arguments: 1. That the borrowchecker causes serious ergonomic problems for Rust. 2. That the role of the borrowchecker in Rust's safety is overstated.

Perversely, because Rust's lifetime riddles are challenging, they are sort of fun. I believe that partly explains why so many people don't seem to mind them. Instead of thinking about how to write my code to solve the scientific problems I'm being paid to solve, I have to think about how to write it to please the borrowchecker. The latter is usually more tractable, limited in scope, have clearer requirements and is more 'puzzle-like'. In that sense, Rust enables escapism: When writing Rust, you get to solve lots of 'problems' - not real problems, mind you, but fun problems.

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A long time ago I wrote on twitter (now erased): "surprising how much computer stuff makes sense viewed as tragic deprivation of sum types". <...> One of the things he [Casey Muratori] discusses in here is that safe and correctly-designed disjoint unions aren't just an ML thing, they were around in the early 60s at least. <...> But another thing Muratori points out is that is that Dahl and Nygaard copied the feature in safe working form into Simula, and Stroustrup knew about it and intentionally dropped it from C++, thinking it inferior to the encapsulation you get from inheritance.