I was recently trying to port a PIC microcontroller
simulator from C++ to Rust as an (unfinished) experiment. Because there were lots of cyclic references (modules talking to each other over "signal busses" with callbacks,) I think I ended up fighting Rust more than it helped. It ended up requiring a lot of Box (pointers to heap) for things where I could store the data inline in C++.
My conclusion is that if you're writing a simple CLI or request-response thing, Rust is probably an easy port. More generally, if your code structure could work well with arena allocations, moving to lifetime-tagging of references isn't a big deal.
But if you're writing (admitted ugly) code with cyclic references the way a C programmer would :), Rust will feel like an uphill battle and is not the place to start. I need to start by restructuring the C++ code, moving ownership to a common parent. I think that'll make things better. Iteratively learning more about Rust, but continuing to work in C++ until the code has a better correspondance to Rust.
Edit: forgot the word simulator, and changed RefCell to Box.