Comment by fasquoika

> But it all seems to be about "raw pointers", which are mostly for talking to non-Rust code and probably ought to be on the way out as more low-level libraries are implemented in Rust.

Plenty of pure Rust code uses pointers. They're necessary for the implementation of things like `Vec`. Raw pointers aren't going anywhere.

> The expressive problems with the ownership model mostly involve backpointers.

These problems can be trivially solved in 95% of cases with arena allocation. The other 5% fundamentally require bespoke solutions because you're trying to do something elaborate/niche.