[stymaar]

> For example, I feel it's just too easy to call `.clone()` to store an owned value instead of storing a reference and introducing the correct lifetime constraints.

There's three levels when on the ownership ladder:

1. Taking ownership of an object: this means your have mutability and 'static lifetime. This often implies cloning though.

2. Having the object behind a ref-counted pointer (Rc or Arc in multi-trhreaded scenario) this way you have 'static but not mutability (unless you're using interior mutability with RefCell/Mutex but now you have to think about deadlock and all)

3. Taking shared references (&) to your object. It's the most performant but now you have to deal with lifetimes so it's not always worth it.

Rust beginners often jump from 1. to 3. (Or don't because “too tedious”) but 2. is a sweet spot that works in many cases and should not be overlooked!

[0b01]

4. Cast to &'static and *. Expert Rust hacker level.

[willglynn]

`Box::leak()` gets you a `&'static` at runtime. No raw pointers and no `unsafe`, but also no way to free the memory (because `&'static`).

This is a technique I've used in anger: https://github.com/AS207960/xml-serde/pull/8