I was thinking the same, the pages need redesign. The best way to make people try out a language is to give an example on the first page (without scrolling). It should be more than "hello world", e.g. 99 bottles of beer or Fibonacci numbers, anything that shows me how the language looks & "feels".

That being said, this looks like a really interesting and promising language. If the borrow-checker is unobtrusive and doesn't require ridiculous boilerplate, then you can count me in! Good work!

There's no technical reason the Rust borrow checker couldn't run without annotations either- that's a design choice, similar to the way Rust requires function types even though it could infer them. It makes inter-function contracts clearer, which improves error messages, and avoid the need for whole-program analysis.

I couldn't find anything more about "view propagation" either but I strongly suspect it's no more powerful. Probably less and/or buggier at this point, given its relative maturity.

But how would you distinguish between

struct A<'a, 'b>(&'a u8, &'b u8);

and

struct B<'a>(&'a u8, &'a u8);

without lifetime annotations?

You can always assume the former(all lifetimes are different). It is strictly more general.

Thanks, so lifetimes can definitely be inferred for safe code (although just like type inference, they can lead to leaky abstractions). But aren't lifetime annotations necessary for unsafe code? How could you cast a pointer into a struct into a raw pointer and back, while preserving the lifetime, without them?

We'd start by making sure these lifetimes need distinguishing, i.e. that they aren't actually equivalent.