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

Question

I\'d like to have struct members that know their parent. This is approximately what I\'m trying to do:

struct Parent<\'me> {
    children: Vec

        

Answer 1

From the official documentation in "Reference Cycles Can Leak Memory" paragraph:

Answer 2

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).