Try and write a mutable doubly linked list in Rust and you will find that it’s problematic for the borrow checker.
Search online and you will find solutions that work around this using ‘RefCell’ (to delegate mutable borrows to runtime), or raw pointers with ‘unsafe’.
I agree for the most part, but writing data structures with shared mutable state can be a total pain in Rust.
How so? That’s like, the thing that makes rust awesome to write.
It’s hard to get those kinds of data structures through the borrow checker.
Try writing a doubly linked list.
It’s because it’s hard to make them correct. It’s not any harder to write it in rust than in C. Just C lets you do it wrong
That’s not right.
Try and write a mutable doubly linked list in Rust and you will find that it’s problematic for the borrow checker.
Search online and you will find solutions that work around this using ‘RefCell’ (to delegate mutable borrows to runtime), or raw pointers with ‘unsafe’.
Both RefCell and unsafe are features of the language. That’s like saying python’s OOP sucks if you don’t use the
classkeyword.I’m not saying it sucks. I’m saying it can be less straight-forward than conventional languages, even for experienced programmers.
The borrow checker is fantastic, but there’s no doubt that it requires a new way of thinking if you’ve never seen Rust before.