Comment by Aurornis

> You can implement the C equivalent manually of course

But you have to implement the C version manually as well.

It's not really a downside to Rust if it provides a convenient feature that you can choose to use if it fits your goals.

The use case you're describing is relatively rare. If it's an actual performance bottleneck then spending a little extra time to implement it in Rust doesn't seem like a big deal. I have a hard time considering this an "unfortunate detail" to Rust when the presence of the Option<_> type provides so much benefit in typical use cases.