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Written 2025-07-18Among the 2010's cohort of programming languages, Rust is probably the most widely lauded.The main selling point of Rust is that it manages to combine speed and low-level control with a high level of bug-resistance, more commonly referred to as safety. The main innovation of Rust - really, its claim to fame - is its borrowchecker: the part of its compiler that enforces Rust's ownership rules and thereby allows Rust to achieve all the memory safety that garbage collected language enjoy, but with zero runtime cost.The evangelists proponents of Rust have made memory safety the central selling point of Rust, to the extent that the borrowchecker has become the defining feature of Rust's identity. I think the conflation of Rust's safety with the borrowchecker's guarantees is somewhat misguided. In this post, I want to make two arguments:That the borrowchecker causes serious ergonomic problems for Rust.That the role of the borrowchecker in Rust's safety is overstated.In a n…