[Starlevel001]

Rust is a clever language, which wrecks havoc on people's programming ego by making them very inclined to try and write clever code.

But if you avoid trying to be really annoying with the type system like the majority of the ecosystem is, and slap Arc/RefCell/heap allocations everywhere, the language turns back into a high-level language again.

Unfortunately, stepping outside the realm of ``core`` and ``alloc`` and ``std`` means having to repeatedly step on overly clever landmines everywhere you go.

[melony]

The problem is that you can't even build data structures from introductory algos in Rust without pulling your hair out. No linked lists, no graphs.

[msbarnett]

That’s really only a problem if you spend a significant amount of time trying to “build data structures from introductory algos” without reaching for unsafe, though.

If you find it easy to build a linked list or graph in C, you can do it just as easily in Rust — use unsafe, and you have your easy linked list, with exactly as much safety as it had in C. Sure, it’s more challenging to build a fully memory and thread safe linked list or graph, but it’s actually hard as hell to do that in C too. Other languages make it easy to build one with these guarantees only by requiring significant runtime support, which is out of scope for Rust.

In the end, it’s pretty unrealistic to expect that any language would allow you to write a guaranteed memory and threadsafe graph structure with zero runtime overhead, without a lot of knowledge, time, and attention on your part — there are no silver bullets.

And if you’re using Rust for anything real you’re generally not doing sophomore computer science homework like this anyway.