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Comment by jamesmunns | Hacker News Reader

For what it's worth: references in Rust (both `&` and `&mut`) are just pointers with stronger static (compile time only) analysis. They have zero runtime impact vs raw pointers.

Even heap allocations like `Box` are still just pointers, that have destructors that run when they fall out of scope, but access is just a pointer dereference, the same as you could do with unsafe.

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If you are just working with data, you can avoid unsafe completely. The issue is that for performant code, you often have to tap into linux libc stuff which doesn't guarantee safety. For example, if you try to to write something with packet_mmap for fast processing of traffic, you will have to use unsafes.

Look at the Firecracker codebase. There are a lot of unsafe calls into libc.

There is also a runtime reference counter which takes up cycles since it has to operate at run time.

Okay, but using unsafe for FFI is entirely different than the claim that you can only achieve performance optimizations through "dereferencing pointers without anything extra running." The use of unsafe for FFI is unavoidable for obvious reasons.

Indeed. Raw pointers are mostly when either crossing FFI barriers (say, calling or being called by C) or when what you want to do can’t be expressed within Rust’s ownership rules without taking on overhead (Rc, cloning, indirections, etc) that’s unacceptable to your specific use case.

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