I played with Rust for a day and while I was impressed with the language as a whole, I felt the borrow checker left a lot to be desired. I don't think having lifetime of references tied to scope works well in general. This is most evident in pattern matching where you are forced to grab your reference in the pattern (even if you don't need to use the reference until much further on), and there is no way to release it until the end of the scope (even though it can be dead much sooner).