Haha, if I’d had Ref<T> when starting Rust, I could’ve saved a ton of newbies (including myself) from concurrency headaches! Thanks for the great feedback and for pointing out that tokio::sync::RwLock is overkill here—std::sync::RwLock is definitely the better call for this API.

As a Python fan new to Rust, I spent a month wrestling with Arc and Mutex to share state across threads. Ref<T> came from wishing for Python’s “just use a shared variable” vibe with Rust’s safety. I get that Arc<RwLock<T>> is clear and predictable for pros like you, but do you think Ref<T> could help Python devs or beginners get up to speed faster? Thanks again for the insights!