Yeah, if you need a linked list (you probably don't) use that. If however you are one of the very small number of people who need fine-grained control over a tailored data-structure with internal cross-references or whatnot then you may find yourself in a world where Rust really does not believe that you know what you are doing and fights you every step of the way. If you actually do know what you are doing, then Zig is probably the best modern choice. The TigerBeetle people chose Zig for these reasons, various resources on the net explain their motivations.

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ViewTrick1002 2 hours ago | parent [-]

The point with the linked list is that it is perfectly valid to use unsafe to design said ”tailored data structure with internal cross-reference or what not” library and then expose a safe interface.

If you’re having trouble designing a safe interface for your collection then that should be a signal that maybe what you are doing will result in UB when looked at the wrong way.

That is how all standard library collections in Rust works. They’ve just gone to the length of formally verifying parts of the code to ensure performance and safety.

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eru an hour ago | parent [-]

> If you’re having trouble designing a safe interface for your collection then that should be a signal that maybe what you are doing will result in UB when looked at the wrong way.

Rust is great, but there are some things that are safe (and you could prove them safe in the abstract), but that you can't easily express in Rust's type system.

More specifically, there are some some things and usage pattern of these things that are safe when taken together. But the library can't force the safe usage pattern on the client, with the tools that Rust provides.

	▲	ViewTrick1002 23 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		If you can't create a safe interface and must have the function then create an unsafe function and clearly document the invariants and then rely on the user to uphold them? Just take a look at the unsafe functions for the standard library Vec type to see examples of this: https://doc.rust-lang.org/std/vec/struct.Vec.html#method.fro...