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I can only offer my point of view as a complete rust novice. Lifetimes are the most intriguing and new aspect of programming in rust - this unfortunately means that when people first start with the language and they run into non-obvious errors, they will need a little handholding.

Google/stackoverflow of course help, but, as an expert, I think you may be a bit biased by your own experience as to how helpful the compiler errors actually are.

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Well, sure, but it's not that nobody was paying attention to lifetime error messages. It's that it's really hard, maybe impossible, to make lifetime error messages make sense for those who are unfamiliar with lifetimes.

> Lifetimes are the most intriguing and new aspect of programming in rust - this unfortunately means that when people first start with the language and they run into non-obvious errors, they will need a little handholding.

I genuinely have no idea how you'd even go around improving lifetime errors, if somebody manages to crack that one I'd probably be willing to set up a recurring donation to whatever they wish.

There's been at least one promising idea floating around: using an IDE to draw out lifetimes, so you can see how they overlap. Something like slides 172/173 of http://www.slideshare.net/nikomatsakis/rust-mozlando-tutoria...

That would be fantastic!

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