> Choosing references as your default is insane, honestly. Safe Rust is akin to writing formally verified software in the mental and ergonomic overhead it incurs. That's not coincidental. I've come to the conclusion one of the biggest mistakes of the community is not pushing pointer-only Rust harder, given they want it to be taken seriously as a systems language.
That's an interesting perspective I hadn't heard before, but I think there are a couple problems. One, the culture is really against using unsafe unless it's impossible to write the code using safe Rust. This happened with the Actix web drama in 2020 [1]. And, there is the opinion that unsafe Rust is harder than C [2]. Not just that, but unsafe Rust is really ugly and annoying to use compared to safe Rust. I think that hinders the potential adoption of your idea, too.
That's an interesting perspective I hadn't heard before, but I think there are a couple problems. One, the culture is really against using unsafe unless it's impossible to write the code using safe Rust. This happened with the Actix web drama in 2020 [1]. And, there is the opinion that unsafe Rust is harder than C [2]. Not just that, but unsafe Rust is really ugly and annoying to use compared to safe Rust. I think that hinders the potential adoption of your idea, too.
[1]: https://steveklabnik.com/writing/a-sad-day-for-rust/
[2]: https://chadaustin.me/2024/10/intrusive-linked-list-in-rust/