This reminds me of something that was popular in some bioinformatics circles years ago. People claimed that Java was faster than C++. To "prove" that, they wrote reasonably efficient Java code for some task, and then rewrote it in C++. Using std::shared_ptr extensively to get something resembling garbage collection. No wonder the real Java code was faster than the Java code written in C++.
I've been writing C++ for almost 30 years, and a few years of Rust. I sometimes struggle with the Rust borrow checker, and it's almost always my fault. I keep trying to write C++ in Rust, because I'm thinking in C++ instead of Rust.
The lesson is always the same. If you want to use language X, you must learn to write X, instead of writing language Y in X.
Using indexes (or node ids or opaque handles) in graph/tree implementations is a good idea both in C++ and in Rust. It makes serialization easier and faster. It allows you to use data structures where you can't have a pointer to a node. And it can also save memory, as pointers and separate memory allocations take a lot of space when you have billions of them. Like when working with human genomes.
I've been writing C++ for almost 30 years, and a few years of Rust. I sometimes struggle with the Rust borrow checker, and it's almost always my fault. I keep trying to write C++ in Rust, because I'm thinking in C++ instead of Rust.
The lesson is always the same. If you want to use language X, you must learn to write X, instead of writing language Y in X.
Using indexes (or node ids or opaque handles) in graph/tree implementations is a good idea both in C++ and in Rust. It makes serialization easier and faster. It allows you to use data structures where you can't have a pointer to a node. And it can also save memory, as pointers and separate memory allocations take a lot of space when you have billions of them. Like when working with human genomes.