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You can do it inefficiently and kinda manually in rust via weak pointers.

Otherwise GC is basically the only way in rust. You can have tightly-scoped GC in rust that doesn't affect the runtime of everything else, though. No good such GCs exist right now.

There are some type system tricks in hypothetical type systems you can do to make it possible to deal with these without runtime tracking. You can use the type system to ensure Detach traits get implemented, where Detach is for breaking cycles in a pass before destruction.

To be clear, when stuff's implemented in a safe block, it's usually implemented correctly, ie safe to use. It's just the logic behind it is harder to track than the normal lifetimes stuff.

I'm betting you could do something with a dependent type system - from what I understand you can encode the state of data as a type... but I'm not really familiar enough to say for certain. Take this comment with a huge grain of salt.

If we knew the answer to that, then maybe safe Rust would be able to handle it :)

Or rather, knew of one without a GC.