One of the places you most often need to use backlinks and other unsafe code in Rust is implementing fancy data structures. Unfortunately that happens to be what a lot of people think of as "programming" because they come up a lot in computer science classes... Fortunately most production code seldom needs new fancy data structures; maps, sets, tuples, structs and reference counting take you a very very long way. For less common things like graphs there are usually crates you can use off the shelf.