Comment by kibwen

Quoting your other post:

  > in C, I can make the computer do absolutely anything I 
  > want it to in exactly the way I want it to. Maybe I 
  > don't like 8-byte pointers on my 64-bit CPU, and I want 
  > to implement a linked list allocating nodes from a 
  > sparse memory-mapped pool with a known base address 
  > using 16-bit indexes which I add to the base to get the 
  > actual addresses when manipulating the list? That could 
  > be a big win depending on what you're doing, and 
  > (correct me if I'm wrong) there is no way to do that in 
  > Java or Haskell.

This is possible in Rust, you'll just need to drop into an "unsafe" block when you want to do the pointer arithmetic. In the meantime, everywhere that isn't in an "unsafe" block is guaranteed to be as safe as normal Rust code. Furthermore, even Rust's "unsafe" blocks are safer than normal C code. Rust is a systems programming language, so we know that you need to do this stuff. We have inline assembly too! Our goal is to isolate the unsafety and thereby make it easier to audit.