Comment by baq

> to implement a self-balancing binary tree in Rust, you need to first understand reference counting, `RefCell`, and ownership semantics. In C, you just need to know what a struct is and what a pointer is.

It is misguided to say that recursive data structures should be easy to write. They are difficult to reason about and the Rust compiler is right to point this out. CS is not engineering, you should be writing those trees with a pencil on a piece of paper as Dijkstra intended, not in C.