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’.
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
class
keyword.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.