There are idioms you can use where instead of references you use indexes into a Vec or other container. This is normal for folks coming from a gamedev background, but non-obvious to everyone else. Once you get the hang of these idioms, the productivity difference between "object soup" Python and Rust gets smaller, and the resulting code is also closer to what a "production" app would need to look like. This is an extra learning curve for Rust, though, on top of the already famously steep learning curve for the basics.
I really don’t like this approach - that’s just pointers without memory safety issues, but you get all the other problems, e.g. use-after-free, without any of the tooling to catch it for you like valgrind.
