[hmm_really]

Well having written a lot of C and a lot of data structures, particular in low resource devices, I'm well aware of the details needed to do so. I suspect many others are in the same camp. Pointers are hard, however after 10 years of practice there not so bad ;)

I feel that saying ohh you should never need to write your own pointer chain (linked list, trees etc) is a bit too sweeping and doesn't match my experience.

"not particularly relevant to most Rust programmers" begs the question is their less of an overlap from C programmers and Rust programmers than is being generally touted?

[steveklabnik]

> however after 10 years of practice there not so bad ;)

I know; I've been using them for over 20 years.

If you're that confident in your knowledge here, then using Rust wouldn't be a problem for you: you can go the unsafe route and just do the same thing you'd do in C.

> doesn't match my experience.

Sure. Your experience hasn't been in Rust. That is, when you have generics, and a good package manager, there's virtually no reason to write your own, as you can always use one that already exists. C doesn't have those things, and so you end up doing a lot more work yourself compared to Rust.

[Accipitriform]

"If you're that confident in your knowledge here, then using Rust wouldn't be a problem for you: you can go the unsafe route and just do the same thing you'd do in C."

That's what I didn't understand - why the author didn't just use "unsafe". There's nothing intrinsically bad about using "unsafe", you just have to test that code thoroughly. There's plenty of robust C code out there.

[hmm_really]

Okay thats the bit that I was missing, seems a reasonable compromise!

[steveklabnik]

Yup. It’s a totally reasonable thing to do here. It’s why it exists!