Suggestion on syntax: just use ‘->’
It has the familiarity from C already. Most rust unsafe programmers are long time C/C++ folks. You can define them to only work on raw pointers (like C) and always produce pointers (unlike C). And using it means no auto-deref magic
E.g.
ptr->field3->[0]->write(7);
ptr->field in C is (*ptr).field, at which point you are in whatever C's equivalent of a "place (lvalue) expression" is. This creates a weird discontinuity where you -> for the first step and then use `.` for subsequent steps and then do the standard "just kidding, it was a pointer offset all along" thing of slapping `&` in front of it.
My proposed ~ always keeps you indirected so you just use ~ all the way until you actually want to load a value from memory (which in C would implicitly happen whenever you have a nested ->).
Explaining it is simple:
‘.’ uses a reference and produces a reference
‘->’ uses a pointer and produces a pointer
`a.b` is of type `B`, only `&a.b` is `&B` and `&mut a.b` is `&mut B`. This is unlike your proposal of `->` where `a->b` would be `*const B`.