I think one core thing that you have to do with ASTs in Rust is to absolutely not store strings of the like in your AST. Instead you want to use something like static string libraries (so you get cheap clones and interning) and for things like positions in text you want to use just indices. Absolutely avoid storing references if you can avoid it!

The more your stuff is held in things that are cheap/free to clone, the less you have to fight the borrow checker… since you can get away with clones!

And for actual interpretation there’s these libraries that can help a lot for memory management with arenas and the like. It’s super specialized stuff but helps to give you perf + usability. Projects like Ruffle use this heavily and it’s nice when you figure out the patterns

Having said that OCaml and Haskell are both languages that will do all of this “for free” with their built in reference counting and GC… I just like the idea of going very fast in Rust