You’re right, of course. To my mind, one way to classify how severe mistakes are is by looking at their potential consequences. For programming, there’s unpredictable, hard-to-identify bugs with far-reaching effects at oneend of the scale. On the other end are mistakes that announce themselves loudly, in a predictable way that are isolated from everything else.

My original comment was a clumsy attempt to reassure ‘antpls and other Rust beginners that lifetime errors generally manifest as the less-troublesome kind on this scale.