Comment by rstuart4133

> But this argument that Rust's memory management isn't more cognitively demanding than Go's memory management --- that isn't true.

It's not far from true. The fights you get into with the borrow checker can be legendary, but lifetimes serve more as gentle reminders. If you get stuck, you can always just use Rc, which is pretty close to opt-in GC. But it's rare to have to resort to Rc, because ownership is just not that much of a problem. In fact, I very rarely use Box either. All heap memory allocation is done by containers, not manually by me. I guess the main friction point for lifetimes is Rust's closures and async, but if you avoid them life is pretty simple.

In return for wearing this almost not a problem, you almost don't have to think about releasing a whole pile of other things - like closing files, sockets, and locks. They are guaranteed to be released by the same mechanism.

On balance, I would not be surprised if the cognitive balance tips Rust's way once you allow for the fact that Rust's memory management also gives you robust resource management for free.