[buildartefact]

>There's no option to "turn the borrow checker off" - which means that when you're in prototyping mode, you pay this huge productivity penalty for no benefit

That’s not really true. The standard workaround for this is just to .clone() or Rc<RefCell<>> to unblock yourself, then come back later and fix it.

It is true that this needs to be done with some care otherwise you can end up infecting your whole codebase with the “workaround”. That comes with experience.

[throw10920]

> It is true that this needs to be done with some care otherwise you can end up infecting your whole codebase with the “workaround”

It's a "workaround" precisely because the language does not support it. My statement is correct - you cannot turn the borrow-checker off, and you pay a significant productivity penalty for no benefit. "Rc" can't detect cycles. ".clone()" doesn't work for complex data structures.

[mtsr]

You can’t turn off undefined behavior in C++ either. Lifetimes exist whether the language acknowledges them or not.

Except if you go to a GC language, but then you’re prototyping other types of stuff than you’d probably pick Rust for.

[lmm]

You can use unsafe if you really want to "turn the borrow-checker off", no?