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Side Note: Other Programming Languages "Hold on," you might say, "other programming languages don’t require me to think about lifetimes. Why does Rust make it so complicated?" The C programming language will happily let you access memory that has been freed, leading to undefined behavior. It will watch in silence as you walk off the edge of a cliff. Dangling pointers are a common source of bugs, and this is what lifetimes in Rust aim to prevent. The Rust compiler makes you stop and think about the ambiguity in your code and forces you to make relationships between data explicit.