That&#x27;s one pleasant effect (although a bit orthogonal to what I was referring to), because my default behavior in Rust is to pass ownership which results in that memory being dropped as soon as it&#x27;s no longer needed.<p>I guess what I&#x27;m referring to is that I think reasoning about the borrow checker is easier when references are opt-in instead of being the default. That behavior is re-enforced by the fact that the language&#x27;s default is ownership. So I only end up needing to think hard about the lifetime of a variable when I&#x27;ve decided to (or been explicitly forced to) use references. I think it&#x27;s a good way to reduce the cognitive burden of an already unfamiliar mechanism.<p>EDIT: This also gets at one of my favorite parts of Rust: so many choices have been made in designing the language and standard library that make it so easy to do things &quot;the right way&quot; (either through those things being the default, or making it hard to do stupid things, etc.).