For example i wrote a digital logic simulator. The last step involved a linking step to turn all indexes into pointers, once the component graph is generated in full and becomes stable in memory. The simulator just chased pointers.

In rust all of that would have either had to keep using indices, be highly non idiomatic by boxing everything (and slower), or implemented in unsafe rust.

If I have to write a lot of unsafe rust, then i would actually switch to cpp because unsafe c++ is easier to get right than unsafe rust