Comment by bunderbunder

Not a game dev, but based on what I do know of it, some of this sounds to me like it's just a severe mismatch between Rust's memory model and the needs of games.

Individually managing the lifetime of every single item you allocate on the heap and fine-grained tracking of ownership of everything on both the heap and the stack makes a lot of sense to me for more typical "line of business" tools that have kind of random and unpredictable workloads that may or may not involve generating arbitrarily complex reference graphs.

But everything I've seen & read of best practices for game development, going all the way back to when I kept a heavily dogeared copy of Michael Abrash's Black Book close at hand while I made games for fun back in the days when you basically had to write your own 3D engine, tells me that's not what a game engine wants. What a game engine wants, if anything, is something more like an arena allocator. Because fine-grained per-item lifetime management is not where you want to be spending your innovation tokens when the reality is that you're juggling 500 megabyte lumps of data that all have functionally the same lifetime.