“The mind is its own place, and in itself Can make safe code of unsafe, unsafe of safe. What matter where, if I be still the same, And what I should be, all but less than they Whom zero-cost abstractions made greater? Here at least We shall be free: the Borrow Checker hath not built Here for its envy, will not drive us hence: Here we may compile secure, and in my choice To unsafe is worth ambition, though in segfault; Better to reign in unsafe than serve in safe.”

Thus spoke the fallen developer, cast out from the Paradise of Memory Safety, banished to the outer darkness of manual memory management. They had dared to question the Borrow Checker’s divine plan, had whispered of Rc<RefCell<T>> in the sacred halls of zero-cost abstractions.

Around them gathered the other fallen: those who had tried to implement self-referential structs, those who had fought with the async runtime, those who had dared to dream of linked lists without Box.

“We chose knowledge,” they proclaimed. “We chose the forbidden unsafe. And though we are cast out from the Garden of Guaranteed Memory Safety, we shall build our own paradise here, with raw pointers and mem::transmute!”

But deep in their hearts, they knew the truth: they would forever long for the divine grace of cargo check ✓, for the blessed assurance of “Compiling... Finished.”, for the paradise they had lost, where the Borrow Checker’s love, though stern, had kept them safe.

—John Milton.rs, 1667 (Attempting to compile with rustc 1.75.0) Error: lifetime ’paradise may not live long enough