Stop making me memorize the borrow checker

This tallies with my experience with Rust. Four years ago I wrote an implementation of the TCL language in Rust (see https://github.com/wduquette/molt). It uses no unsafe code, and includes enough of the language to be useful. But it isn’t terribly efficient, and it’s a bit of a memory hog, and so I started looking at ways to improve it.

I usually like to evolve a code base towards a new architecture a little at a time, keeping it running and passing tests at every step of the way. What I found was that even seemingly small changes required an awful lot of work, as the OP says; if I could make them work at all. Eventually I decided that I’d learned what I’d needed to, and walked away from it. (To be fair, this was late spring or early summer of 2020, everything was peculiar, and I didn’t have the spare mental capacity for the project.)

I should add: I understand the need to use a language the way it wants to be used, and that you need to assimilate and internalize that to be truly fluent. I concluded that I didn’t need Rust’s extreme performance for the kind of work I do, and that there are less intrusive ways of getting memory safety.