I buy the premise that Zig is better if you know you will have lots of pointer arithmetic going on. Having written a fair amount of unsafe C interop code in Rust, I feel like these critiques of the ergonomics are valid. The new #![feature(strict_provenance)] adds a new layer of complexity, that, I hope, improves some of this experience while adding safety. Rust's benefits are not free.

The benefits of Rust's (wonderful) model around references and lifetimes come at a significant cost to ergonomics when having to go into the Mordor of some C library and back. I usually find myself wishing I could have some macro where I just write in C and have it exposed as an unsafe back in Rust. I know I can do this by just writing a C dylib and integrating that, but now I've got two problems.

Even still, I prefer writing unsafe Rust to writing C. std::mem::ptr forces me to ask the right questions and reminds me of just how easy it is to fall into UB in C as well.