Automatically deriving Clone is a convenience. You can and should write your own implementation for Clone whenever you need it and automatically derived implementation is insufficient.
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By the way, this issue also affects all of the other derivable traits in std - including PartialEq, Debug and others. Manually deriving all this stuff - especially Debug - is needless pain. Especially as your structs change and you need to (or forget to) maintain all this stuff.
Elegant software is measured in the number of lines of code you didn't need to write.
Strong disagree. Elegant software is easy to understand when read, without extraneous design elements, but can easily have greater or fewer lines of code than an inelegant solution.
I think software - like mathematics - becomes more elegant & beautiful when we find ways to simplify it without making it worse in other ways. Minimising the number of lines of code isn’t the goal. But sometimes making something smaller also makes it easier to understand and sometimes even more powerful at the same time. Those are the days I live for.
Alan Kay says the right point of view is worth 50 IQ points. There are plenty of examples of this in software. Innovations in ways of structuring our programs that make them at once simpler and more beautiful. All without sacrificing anything important in the process. We take them for granted now, but innovation is rarely obvious from the outset. Compilers and high level languages. Sum types. Operating systems. Maybe SQL and ECS. Sinatra’s http handler API. And so on.