[mcguire]

In fact (unless something has changed dramatically without my getting the memo), that's how you would write many data structures in Rust---either for better memory behavior or you have cycles and Rc won't cut it. You have to use a vector of nodes and indices as pointers; if you try using references, the borrow checker comes and kicks sand in your face.

[Rusky]

It's doable to keep using pointers instead of indices- they just all have the lifetime of the vector and you can freely follow them around.

This does prevent resizing the vector, but you can get around that by using a different arena that allocates in chunks rather than reallocating (and thus doesn't require a unique reference for .insert).