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The borrow checker makes a doublily linked list difficult, from my understanding. They're almost always a bad data structure to pick though, as the speed diffe

The borrow checker makes a doublily linked list difficult, from my understanding. They're almost always a bad data structure to pick though, as the speed difference between being able to iterate a contiguous list, and even completely rebuild it, vs having to follow arbitrary pointers mean that the 'complexity' improvements of a linked list often become irrelevant. ------ Open Question) I have this intuition that the borrow checker might enforce a way of working that fundamentally stops you from doing things that aren't _really_ compatible with the way a CPU actually works on the lowest level. Is there any credence to that, and if so, is it happenstance, or is there some more fundamental reason?

kaba0 4y ago
> I have this intuition that the borrow checker might enforce a way of working that fundamentally stops you from doing things that aren't _really_ compatible with the way a CPU actually works on the lowest level. No, I think you are reading too much into it. One is free to Box-allocate/pointer-chase on every line in Rust without any trouble. Sure, as other low level languages, rust also prefers/makes stack-allocation more ergonomic/the default, which is a quite cache-friendly way of operation but not even the stack is “native” in and of itself - it is just a frequently and extensively used part of the “heap”.