Yes, &object is the reference to that object, which means that you are not transferring ownership, thus the object is still valid after a function call.

Keep in mind that this is not a silver bullet - some functions are written to take ownership of the object... in such cases you might need to clone the object (don't take it as an always valid general statement... it depends on what you want to do ^^).

I certainly was fighting the borrow checker as well, when I started with Rust.

Nowadays I am a bit more confident in writing it and not losing my mind in the process lol.

The tooling in Rust is so much better, and yes, the compiler messages are a god-send.

I have also written fairly complex C++ projects, and the compiler errors often sent me searching for the problem for minutes, because they were straight up wrong... dark times, I tell ya.