That's because in order to interact with pointers you need unsafe, and not using unsafe in Rust requires a single ownership tree or reference counting. If you're not keen on either of those solutions, you shouldn't be writing a Doubly Linked List in other languages either (because they will have either pointers or reference counting/GC).
"Those solutions" start off being hierarchical ownership or reference counting, but turn into "pointers or reference counting". Requiring pointers is implicit to the definition of linked lists, and calling it out here is silly. And you don't really need either ref counting (again, pretty obviously, witness every real world implementation) or hierarchical ownership outside Rust.
Conceptually, the list as a vague concept owns all the nodes. The ownership just stops being expressible directly through references the way Rust wants it to be. But you don't have to re-invent hierarchical ownership to implement DLLs in other languages, because it's not really there in the problem. You just have to accept that they're always going to suck under Rust's ownership model.
estebank|3 years ago
andrewflnr|3 years ago
Conceptually, the list as a vague concept owns all the nodes. The ownership just stops being expressible directly through references the way Rust wants it to be. But you don't have to re-invent hierarchical ownership to implement DLLs in other languages, because it's not really there in the problem. You just have to accept that they're always going to suck under Rust's ownership model.
tracker1|3 years ago