Juggling (raw) pointers is still an option in Rust, just not the most idiomatic one. But you're right that expressing cyclic data structures is very challengin

Juggling (raw) pointers is still an option in Rust, just not the most idiomatic one. But you're right that expressing cyclic data structures is very challenging to do idiomatically in Rust. Using integer handles as pointer replacements does have some universal benefits though outside of Rust. You can make them more compact, they serialize more easily, etc.