[zozbot234]

A doubly linked list is not the optimal case for GC. It can be implemented with some unsafe code, and there are approaches that implement it safely with GhostCell (or similar facilities, e.g. QCell) plus some zero-overhead (mostly) "compile time reference counting" to cope with the invariants involved in having multiple references simultaneously "own" the data. See e.g. https://github.com/matthieu-m/ghost-collections for details.

Where GC becomes necessary is the case where even static analysis cannot really mitigate the issue of having multiple, possibly cyclical references to the same data. This is actually quite common in some problem domains, but it's not quite as simple as linked lists.