alt Hacker News> but one reaps the benefits later thanks to more confidence when refactoring or adding code.
To be honest, I believe it makes refactoring/maintenance take longer. Sure, safer, but this is not a one-time only price.
E.g. you decide to optimize this part of the code and only return a reference or change the lifetime - this is an API-breaking change and you have to potentially recursively fix it. Meanwhile GC languages can mostly get away with a local-only change.
Don't get me wrong, in many cases this is more than worthwhile, but I would probably not choose rust for the n+1th backend crud app for this and similar reasons.
The choice of whether to use GC is completely orthogonal to that of a type system. On the contrary, being pointed at all the places that need to be recursively fixed during a refactoring is a huge saving in time and effort.