[cropcirclbureau]

Perfectly safe at the expense of a garbage collector. You can still do pointer soup and int handle based lists as you can do in any other low-level language with the same caveats. Rust is punching up from the manual memory management, zero-cost abstraction plane and competing with the garbage collected langs. It's still at it's core a tool for writing low level code.

[moldavi]

GP was confused about why the doubly linked list case was so important, so I enlightened, it's an example of an entire class of the borrow checker's problems.

Your response isn't really relevant in that context, and instead escalates to a much larger debate, so best I not engage. Appreciate the thought though =)