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The borrow checker and lifetime annotations. It's always the borrow checker and lifetime annotations - otherwise Rust is, IMHO, as readable as (the excellent) Golang.

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I've often wondered what it would be like having a variant of Rust that was essentially the same underlying language, but with a garbage collector of some kind instead of a borrow checker and lifetime annotations.

You can approximate this already: forget Rust references (borrow checking + lifetimes; in other words, raw pointers) and start hacking with Rust using its shared ownership (reference-counted) smart pointers, immutable Rc<T>[1], mutable RefCell<T>[2] and the combination of the two[3]. The syntax will, overall, get considerably more dense than Go, but otherwise analogous to Go. Instead of GC cycles, memory will be freed incrementally, immediately when no longer in use.

[1] - https://doc.rust-lang.org/book/ch15-04-rc.html

[2] - https://doc.rust-lang.org/book/ch15-05-interior-mutability.h...

[3] - https://doc.rust-lang.org/book/ch15-05-interior-mutability.h...

That would be pretty close to OCaml.

That's fair. My favorite language so far has been F#, so maybe it's some of that preference sneaking through.

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