[mre]

For people who don't get the reference, this might be referring to the notoriously gnarly task of implementing a doubly-linked lists in Rust [1]

It is doable, just not as easy as in other languages because a production-grade linked-list is unsafe because Rust's ownership model fundamentally conflicts with the doubly-linked structure. Each node in a doubly-linked list needs to point to both its next and previous nodes, but Rust's ownership rules don't easily allow for multiple owners of the same data or circular references.

You can implement one in safe Rust using Rc<RefCell<Node>> (reference counting with interior mutability), but that adds runtime overhead and isn't as performant. Or you can use raw pointers with unsafe code, which is what most production implementations do, including the standard library's LinkedList.

https://rust-unofficial.github.io/too-many-lists/

[Animats]

Rust still needs a way out of that mess. It's conceptually possible to have compile time checking for this. Think of RefCell/Weak and .upgrade() and .borrow() being checked at compile time.

I've discussed this with some of the Rust devs. The trouble is traits. You'd need to know if a trait function could borrow one of its parameters, or something referenced by one of its parameters. This requires analysis that can't be done until after generics have been expanded. Or a lot more attributes on trait parameters. This is a lot of heavy machinery to solve a minor problem.

[bigstrat2003]

> Rust still needs a way out of that mess.

It has one: use raw pointers and unsafe. People are way too afraid of unsafe, it's there specifically to be used when needed.

[umanwizard]

> Rust still needs a way out of that mess.

In practice, it really doesn't. The difficulty of implementing doubly linked lists has not stopped people from productively writing millions of lines of Rust in the real world. Most programmers spend less than 0.1% of their time reimplementing linked data structures; rust is pretty useful for the other 99.9%.

[sbrother]

Apologies since I have not taken the time to learn rust yet, but I've written a lot of modern C++. Is the ownership model kind of like std::unique_ptr and std::move, and `Rc<RefCell<Node>>` the same idea as `std::shared_ptr`? But less idiomatic? Or do I have the wrong idea?

[khuey]

Not really, because Rust enforces a "many readers or one writer" invariant on everything that has no C++ equivalent. That invariant is precisely what makes the doubly-linked list case hard (because every interior node in the list would be readable from two places, which means it can never be written to).

[worik]

I am working on a code base, that among its many glories and poo balls every list is a doubly linked list.

Stop!

If you are using a doubly linked list you (probably) do not have to, or want to.

There is almost no case where you need to traverse a list in both directions (do you want a tree?)

A doubly linked list wastes memory with the back links that you do not need.

A singly linked list is trivial to reason about: There is this node and the rest. A doubly linked list more than doubles that cognitive load.

Think! Spend time carefully reasoning about the data structures you are using. You will not need that complicated, wasteful, doubly linked list

[dmitrygr]

> There is almost no case where you need to traverse a list in both directions

But you might need to remove a given element that you have a pointer to in O(1), which a singly linked list will not do