Prototyping methodologies

[H2CO3]

@LukeTPeterson

allow an object to take ownership (for lifetime purposes) of any other object. A function like "drop_this_after_that" (there's definitely a better name). For example, the function would let an object that was borrowed from a Ref<>, then take ownership of its Ref<> (and in turn the object would inherit the Ref<>'s borrow from the original RefCell). That would mean the Ref<> wouldn't be accessible in code anymore, but would be hanging out in memory and wouldn't be dropped until right after the target object was. This feature would solve all the "cannot return object borrowed from temporary value" problems,

…which are far fewer in number than the kinds of memory management bugs the current ownership system prevents. It also places the importance of programmer annoyance above that of preventing bugs, which I find misguided in the context of a systems language.

Day by day, new posts are created on the URLO forum, where people new to the language want to change one of the two principal memory safety mechanisms, ownership and borrowing, being upset that code they are used to writing in other languages doesn't work in Rust as-is. Recent examples are: one, two, three, four.

That is not a good direction to go in. Rust is different from other languages, and if one didn't (have to) consider the problems it solves before, one will need to learn new patterns, and probably also un-learn old, bad habits that happen to be dangerous but have been largely ignored in the past.