Implementing data structures is considered an 'advanced' topic in Rust. That's ok for two reasons: 1) The data structures you'll need for most scenarios are in

Implementing data structures is considered an 'advanced' topic in Rust. That's ok for two reasons: 1) The data structures you'll need for most scenarios are in the standard library. The data structures you'll need for pretty much every scenario anyone has ever encountered in Rust are on crates.io. It should be relatively rare that you need to write one. 2) Writing data structures IS an advanced topic. The fact that you have trouble with the borrow checker trying to implement them highlights that understanding data ownership can get very complicated. Plus there's usually lots of corner cases to get tripped up in (I can't tell you how many times I've had to debug issues causes with crap implementations of circular buffers in C). And when you do need to write a data structure - unsafe is there to allow you to do it. And given Rusts type system, you can write that data structure once, make REALLY sure you got the unsafe bits right and then hide it behind a beautiful abstraction and never think of it again.