The one in std uses unsafe. My main concern with learning rust is that you can spend ages trying to learn “the right way” of doing things in rust, when the right way really is to use unsafe.
Re:Was Rust Worth It?
by littlestymaar on Saturday October 28, 2023 @02:45PM
(#38052335)
No, the right way is to use unsafe primitives that have been tested, audited or even formally proven (like the ones in std).
Sometimes such a primitive doesn't exist and you should use unsafe yourself, but then you're the one supposed to make sure that your code is in fact sound. If you keep unsafe for small portions of the code you can reason about and extensively test so Miri gives you a good level of confidence, then it's fine to use unsafe. But it's the more expensive option, not the default.
For linked-lists, there's one in std and the majority of people should never have to write their own as it's error prone and requires unsafe.
For graph use-case then you can either use ECS, arena, ref counting or unsafe, but you're probably better off using/developing a dedicated crate that optimizes it and abstract it away behind an easy to use (and safe) interface.