> If in 2012 you read a similar article explaining borrow checking in academic terms you would have thought Rust would be unusably hard, which is not.
Ironically, Rust was unusably hard prior to the late-2018 edition. So now your academic article has to explain both the baseline borrow checker and non-lexical lifetimes, a vast increase in complexity.
Your statement contradicts itself. It was unusable hard before non-lexical lifetimes, but they vastly increased the complexity? Then maybe what’s complex for compiler writers to implement can make the user’s life easier by lowering the complexity of their code?
Ironically, Rust was unusably hard prior to the late-2018 edition. So now your academic article has to explain both the baseline borrow checker and non-lexical lifetimes, a vast increase in complexity.