I never thought about using a Vec for these, but that is a great idea for keeping the memory management sane for tree/linked lists. One thing I would add that

I never thought about using a Vec for these, but that is a great idea for keeping the memory management sane for tree/linked lists. One thing I would add that you need to be wary of destructors with large pointer data structures in Rust since it can easily stack overflow. When using Option<Box<T>> you need to be careful to call Option::take on the pointers in a loop to avoid stack overflow.