Why writing a linked list in safe Rust is so damned hard

Re:Why writing a linked list in safe Rust is so damned hard by mehrdadn on Thursday February 22, 2018 @07:42PM (#16443100)

Hmm... that doesn't make sense. Weak references are for refcounted values. There does not need to be any refcounting involved here at all.

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Re:Why writing a linked list in safe Rust is so damned hard by Retra on Thursday February 22, 2018 @08:02PM (#16443250)

There's no safe, general way to do shared ownership without ref counting or garbage collection. You can't expect Rust to provide one; it already provides ref counting and raw pointers, which is as good as any other Non-GC language does.

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Re:Why writing a linked list in safe Rust is so damned hard by vvanders on Thursday February 22, 2018 @07:49PM (#16443143)

Yes but single owner and refcount of 1 are semantically the same. If you want to be strict about this just keep the Rc private to the implementations and only hand out Weak<T>.

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Re:Why writing a linked list in safe Rust is so damned hard by mehrdadn on Thursday February 22, 2018 @07:52PM (#16443173)

So you're suggesting we add a refcount to every value because it can be made to be semantically the same as not having one?

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Re:Why writing a linked list in safe Rust is so damned hard by vvanders on Thursday February 22, 2018 @07:56PM (#16443206)

If you want to stay in safe Rust, sure. If that's too much overhead feel free to drop down to unsafe and do it just like in C/C++.

FWIW Rc is pretty lightweight. Arc is the heavier(and threadsafe) variant.

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