Hands-On Data Structures and Algorithms with Rust

After use

Whenever the list needs to be disposed of, Rust calls a drop() method that is automatically implemented. However, since this is an automated process, each member is dropped recursively—which works OK until the level of nested next pointers exceeds the stack for executing the drop() method and crashes the program with an unexpected stack overflow message.

As a consequence, it is a good idea for production usage to also implement the Drop trait and dispose of the list elements iteratively. By the way, a stack overflow also happens while using the derived Debug implementation to print a Node—for the same reason.