What lifetimes do I use to create Rust structs that reference each other cyclically?

by

It is not possible to create cyclic structures with borrowed pointers.

There is not any good way of achieving cyclic data structures at present; the only real solutions are:

  1. Use reference counting with Rc<T> with a cyclic structure with Rc::new and Rc:downgrade. Read the rc module documentation and be careful to not create cyclic structures that use strong references, as these will cause memory leaks.
  2. Use raw/unsafe pointers (*T).

More Related Contents:

  1. How to clone a struct storing a boxed trait object?
  2. Automatically implement traits of enclosed type for Rust newtypes (tuple structs with one field)
  3. What is the difference between ‘&self’ and ‘&’a self’?
  4. Why can’t I store a value and a reference to that value in the same struct?
  5. Why is it discouraged to accept a reference to a String (&String), Vec (&Vec), or Box (&Box) as a function argument?
  6. Is there any way to return a reference to a variable created in a function?
  7. What are Rust’s exact auto-dereferencing rules?
  8. Why can I return a reference to a local literal but not a variable?
  9. What’s the difference between placing “mut” before a variable name and after the “:”?
  10. Cannot move out of borrowed content / cannot move out of behind a shared reference
  11. Why are explicit lifetimes needed in Rust?
  12. Cannot borrow as mutable because it is also borrowed as immutable
  13. Initialize nested struct definition
  14. How to set and get fields in struct’s method
  15. Why is the return type of Deref::deref itself a reference?
  16. Why does pattern matching on &Option yield something of type Some(&T)?
  17. Assign struct with another struct
  18. Can embedded struct method have knowledge of parent/child?
  19. Convert Vec into a slice of &str in Rust?
  20. Missing type in composite literal
  21. How does a C-style struct with a bitfield get represented in a Rust #[repr(C)] struct?
  22. Swift and mutating struct
  23. When should I not implement a trait for references to implementors of that trait?
  24. Golang : Is conversion between different struct types possible?
  25. How to abstract over a reference to a value or a value itself?
  26. nested struct initialization literals
  27. Sizeof struct in Go
  28. How to avoid code duplication of different structs with semantically equal fields/properties?
  29. Rust lifetime error expected concrete lifetime but found bound lifetime
  30. How can I conditionally provide a default reference without performing unnecessary computation when it isn’t used?

Leave a Comment