Low-level implementation details

[neverfox]

I'm thinking about venturing down the path of implementing some persistent data structures in Rust, namely RRB-vectors and, subsequently, hitchhiker trees, so this has been a great example to study. I'm curious about the use of alloc/libc here. I take it you're essentially trying to make up for the lack of GC? If so, I'm curious if these kind of structures could be built with less low-level memory manipulation, using something like “epoch-based memory reclamation”. Thoughts?