The "workarounds or other code contortions" I'm talking about is the focus of the article. The point of the article is that safe Rust cannot directly represent circular data structures and therefore you need workarounds to represent them. My point is rather than fighting the borrow checker you could use two complimentary languages to achieve the same goal.

To add more context: I tried the articles suggestion and used integer handles some years back and shared my feedback on HN [1]. It wasn't a good experience as integer handles are just pointers the borrow checker doesn't know about. It made the implementation far more cumbersome than it needed to be.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32907482