I definitely see your point about the interconnection of references, mutability and lifetime in Rust, but I guess the issue of whether Rust has a problem with the classic O-O comes down to the question of what you are trying to implement. If you are implementing a graph-like data structure (for example, UI widgets in a window), you need to keep track of multiple mutable constituent structures; in that situation, Rust references indeed are problematic for the classic O-O and you need Rc<>/RefCell<> smart pointer shenanigans. If you are implementing an actor (an algorithm, a subsystem, a process, etc. - for example, a Product, a Customer and an Order), you usually need to keep track of only a handful of structures representing the input to an actor, all of them likely immutable (a mutable actor with its input kept immutable to eliminate unexpected input side-effects); in that situation, Rust has no problem with the classic O-O, since abstractions can be expressed through references to trait objects.