And that should be fine. unsafe is not something to be forbidden, it is a marker for "here-be-dragons, as the compiler can't check that all invariants are correct when you dereference a raw pointer or modify a mutable static variable". In reality I've found the need for unsafe to be minimal, either when doing something that is actually forbidden for good reason or interacting with C libraries.
Yes, the OP said explicitly that he decided to use unsafe to deal with these cases.
>I decided this time I should just ignore all the dislike of `unsafe` and just use it as much as I need to. I think I was making life more difficult on myself by trying to avoid it so much, but when you have a lot of pointers that have multiple refereces between then, you kind of have to. Doulble linked and mutually linked structures - where any pointer chance can lead to a mutation - are Rust's achillies heel.
Sriram_malhar pointed out that doubly linked lists are usually not a good data structure to use anyway. I was pointing out that there are lots of more useful data structures that raise similar issues in Rust.
I don't think that using unsafe is "fine", necessarily. It is much better to implement a data structure on top of safe Rust if at all possible.
