> All in all, it remains true that Rust doesn't really provide any safety above C++ in regard to writing these kinds of node-based data structures,
Yup! Rust does not fix all your problems, sadly. Maybe some of them. :-)
If you're working with graph-like structures in Rust, then you have two choices:
1. You can work with pointers using 'unsafe' blocks, and then wrap everything inside a nice, safe API. This is a good tradeoff if your data structure is only a tiny portion of your code, or if it's reusable. (Most of the data structures in Rust's 'std' crate are written like this.)
2. You can work with indices instead of pointers. This is the approach taken by petgraph (https://docs.rs/petgraph/0.4.3/petgraph/), which is currently one of the best graph libraries for Rust.
Not all Rust code needs to be safe. It's OK to write "unsafe" code and put it behind a "safe" API. If I can eliminate 98% of the opportunities for pointer bugs, I'm happy to eyeball the remaining 2% manually.
Yup! Rust does not fix all your problems, sadly. Maybe some of them. :-)
If you're working with graph-like structures in Rust, then you have two choices:
1. You can work with pointers using 'unsafe' blocks, and then wrap everything inside a nice, safe API. This is a good tradeoff if your data structure is only a tiny portion of your code, or if it's reusable. (Most of the data structures in Rust's 'std' crate are written like this.)
2. You can work with indices instead of pointers. This is the approach taken by petgraph (https://docs.rs/petgraph/0.4.3/petgraph/), which is currently one of the best graph libraries for Rust.
Not all Rust code needs to be safe. It's OK to write "unsafe" code and put it behind a "safe" API. If I can eliminate 98% of the opportunities for pointer bugs, I'm happy to eyeball the remaining 2% manually.