> I'm convinced Rust is easier to write without the management of lifetimes in a short time span.

Yeah that's the problem with all these studies that use students writing new code for a few hours.

99% of coding isn't like that - it's reading other people's code (including code you wrote ages ago and can't remember), trying to figure out how it works, following complex call chains, debugging etc.

If you only look at Advent of Code type problems you'll come up with all sorts of strange conclusions, like static types don't make a difference, comments aren't useful at all, it doesn't matter if you exclusively use single character variable names, goto is totally harmless, etc. etc.

Though in this particular case I guess they didn't have much choice because there are no existing large programs written using Bronze.