It's not appropriate to say that "having trouble with borrow checker means code is wrong". Sometimes you just want to add a new feature and the borrow check force you to do a big refactor.
“You are just not holding it right.”
Rust borrow checker indeed does force you to make contorsion to keep it happy and will bite you if you fail to take its particularity into account. It’s all fine and proper if you think the trade-off regarding safety is worth it (and I think it is in some case) but pretending that’s not the case is just intentionally deluding yourself.
The people here implying that the BC forces you to use a good architecture are also deluding themselves by the way. It forces you to use an architecture that suits the limitations of the borrow checker. That’s pretty much it.
The fact that such delusions are so prevalent amongst part of the community is from my perspective the worst part of using Rust. The language itself is very much fine.
> Rust is definitely hard, but after a while it's fine and you kind of get how even if using another language you still have to think about memory.
That kind of comment is a typical exemple. It’s not that you have to think about memory. You have to understand the exact limitations of the analyser Rust uses to guarantee memory safety. I don’t understand why it’s so hard to accept for some part of the Rust community.
And as the other commenter said, the borrow checker isn't all that hard to satisfy. BC complaints are often related to serious memory handling bugs. So if you know how to solve such bugs (which you need to know with C or C++ anyway), BC won't frustrate you. You may occasionally face some issues that are hard to solve under the constraints of the BC. But you can handle them by moving the safety checks from compile-time to runtime (using RefCell, Mutex, etc) or handle it manually (using unsafe) if you know what you're doing.
Like the other commenter, I find some of the complaints about programming friction and refactor to be exaggerated very often. That's unfair towards Rust in that it hurts its adoption.