rust-forest

> But I'm not sure I've heard of anyone running into that limitation in practice. Algorithms processing trees and graphs are everywhere, both in practice and in CS theory. Both are hard to implement in Rust and/or slow and/or require complex unsafe code. Here’s an example for trees, as you see all 3 approaches are far from ideal: https://github.com/SimonSapin/rust-forest Another thing, because of that ownership thing, in Rust it’s harder to compose data structures. For example, here’s 1300 lines of code implementing hashmap + linked list combination: https://docs.rs/linked-hash-map/0.4.2/src/linked_hash_map/li... Sure, that particular collection is already in Rust’s standard library. However, quite often I need to compose standard library containers my own way. In Rust, that’s either a lot of complex unsafe code like that LinkedHashMap, o

> Even a trivial tree is hard to implement in Rust, and the implementation will be severely limited: https://github.com/SimonSapin/rust-forest I mean, you haven't actually pointed at a trivial tree implementation. The requirement that children be able to navigate to siblings is the issue here (complicating unique ownership by parents). You could totally do a "trivial tree" as struct Tree<T> { payload: T, children: Vec<Tree<T>>, } which your link even says. You would need a handle to the parent to surf around through siblings, is the limitation. It's not really clear (to me) that the rctree is really all that complicated; the Rc stuff is there to clarify ownership: for how long should allocated memory stick around. It might just read weirdly due to familiarity, in the same way that D might weird me out.

This article only covers the code. For the projects I work on (mostly C++ and/or C#), about 50% of decisions I make while coding is about data, not code. IMO, Rust just not good enough for creating complex specialized data structures. Even a trivial tree is hard to implement in Rust, and the implementation will be severely limited: https://github.com/SimonSapin/rust-forest D surely has it’s problems as well (in short, I think the language itself is very good, but its runtime and libraries still need a lot of work), but at least it’s good for complex data structures.