I think `unsafe` is important to talk about. It's the escape hatch that lets you subvert the type system and do things that the compiler cannot statically reason about. The ability to implement Arc in pure Rust code is very important. But I do agree that it could have been presented perhaps in a different way.
Agreed. My experiments with rust have been uphill because I've been fighting with lifetimes, ownership and borrowing.
For the most part I failed to see that I -needed- unsafe code in some situations. Instead I was trying (failing) to annotate my code to ridiculous levels with lifetimes. It was really frustrating.
I don't think the current docs do a great job of putting unsafe in a suitable perspective. It's somewhat downplayed IMO.
Still, I've learned now and it's been pretty pleasant after that.
FWIW I've been doing c++ for maybe 18 years, writing device drivers, game engines, compiler development. I thought rust was made for me but it's been tough, much more so than any other language except maybe SML!
