While I might agree that it's easy if you use a reference counter, this is not going to be as performant as the typical linked list written in C, which is why the standard library uses unsafe for its implementation of stuff like this. If it were "easy" to just write correct `unsafe`, then it would be easy to do it in C as well.

Note that the converse to this isn't necessarily true! People I trust way more to write unsafe Rust code than me than me have argued that unsafe Rust can be harder than writing C in some ways due to having to uphold certain invariants that don't come up in C. While there are a number of blog posts on the topic that anyone interested can probably find fairly easily by googling "unsafe Rust harder than C", I'll break my usual rule of strongly preferring articles to video content to link a talk from youtube because the speaker is one of those people I mention who I'd trust more than me to write unsafe code and I remember seeing him give this talk at the meetup: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QAz-maaH0KM

> unsafe Rust can be harder than writing C in some ways due to having to uphold certain invariants that don't come up in C.

Yes, this is absolutely correct and on top of this you sometimes have to employ tricks to make the compiler infer the right lifetime or type for the abstraction you're providing. On the other hand, again thanks to the abstraction power of Rust compared to C, you can test the resulting code way more easily using for example Miri.