something that intimidates me about learning a new language, is that I'm not experienced enough to make things simple
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I tried writing something fun in Rust, but it needed a graph data structure, and the Rust memory model doesn't believe in graphs or at least that's what a quick googling led me to believe
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Most of the problem has to do with ownership of the reference to a graph node or edge. It's also why (doubly-)linked lists are hard.
I imagine some tricks could be played with RefCell<T>, Rc<T>, and Weak<T>, or some composition thereof, to get somewhere fruitful.
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Rc<T> and Weak<T> works for a graph with a clear tree-like ownership structure. The ownership structure still needs to be a tree or you'll leak memory.
If you have cycles, those are going to leak unless you do something about it and in that case using Rc<T> doesn't seem useful.
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When I initially contributed Rc<T> to Rust, it statically prevented cycles. The type constraints needed made it a lot less useful.
You can create cycles now, but it's essentially broken and you aren't really supposed to do it. Connections forming a cycle are meant to be Weak<T>.