I'm a relative beginner at Rust, but this matches my experience fairly well. Especially the part about the brittleness, where adding just one little thing can require propagating changes throughout a project. It might be adding lifetimes, or switching between values and references, or wrapping things in Rc or Arc or RefCell or Box or something. It seems hard to do Rust in a fully bottom-up fashion; you'll end up having to adjusting all the pieces repeatedly as you fit them together.
Maybe there's a style I haven't learned yet where you start out with Arc everywhere, or Rc, or Arc<Mutex<T>>, or whatever, and get everything working first then strip out as many wrappers as possible? 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? I don't know enough to know.
I have already noticed that building up the mindset of figuring out your ownership story, where your values are being moved to all the time, is addictive and contagious -- I'm sneaking more and more Rusty ways of doing things into my C++ code, and so far it feels beneficial.
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