I didn't see this comment when replying above, but you can write a doubly-linked list in safe Rust with either of these approaches (GC, or stuffing everything into a single giant reference). The only reason a "basic" doubly-linked list in Rust is unsafe is that those aren't really reasonable options, and Rust wants to do better. I don't think it would improve Rust to give it mandatory GC (Go and Java are both great languages if you want that), or to require that all allocations are unsafe unless you use memory pools.