Yes, I think I know exactly where you're coming from. I've gone through the same cycle of starting and stopping with it, for the same reason. I will sometimes spend hours looking at a simple function thinking "There has to be a way to get this to work," when I would have long since put the sequence of if-else statements in a C program, or just allocated some heap memory and been done with it. It's like I want Rust to be Haskell, but without the GC, and I feel like I'm dumb for not being able to make it work that way. It seems like the abstractions Rust makes available should be composable in a way that is prevented by the memory model. The language features are mostly there, but it's just tantalizingly out of reach and it seems to trigger my "puzzle solving" response.
Hear! Hear! I often have to persuade myself: “It’s OK to use String/box, buddy. There are more wasteful programmers in the world. No need to feel guilty of not using references as much as you can,” etc. But still, you can’t stop thinking there may be a better way to do this...
