I love this attitude. We don’t necessarily need a reason to build new things. Who knows what will come out of a hobby project. Thanks to the author for the great write up!
Also, my gardening is full of segfaults, coding a new project is definitely safer to my yard.
interesting, I'm new to rust. what are you doing that necessitates using unsafe?
C pointers can have as many owners as you want, may be subjected to mathematical operations, and can be cast to any type without even an error message. The compiler will just assume you know what you're doing. If you enable enough compiler warnings, it might warn you, but C compilers don't generate a lot of those by default.
Rust will let you only generate one mutable (exclusive) reference at a time. This means straight C to Rust ports simply don't compile.
By switching to pointers, which work pretty much like their C equivalent, you can port the code much easier, but you do of course lose the benefits of Rust's safety mechanisms, because most pointer operations throw away all the safety guarantee that Rust provides.