[baq]

This is a common thing to say for folks who are really good at low level C/C++. You guys know too much, seen horrors no one should have ever seen and came out alive on the other side.

The problem is, the things you needed to do to stay alive in this environment are antipatterns in Rust and you’ve learned the hard way Rust actively opposes being fed Rust antipatterns.

Self referential data structures are some of the hardest problems in CS to get right. There are patterns that work with Rust which replace pointers with eg generational indexes. You’ll find people do the same thing in C++ once they get burnt one time too many. I think you’d have a very different experience if you approached your system with an ECS framework, either off the shelf or roll your own.