Rust has a particular meaning of 'unsafe': https://doc.rust-lang.org/book/unsafe.html https://doc.rust-lang.org/book/unsafe.html There are just 3 things it allo

Rust has a particular meaning of 'unsafe': https://doc.rust-lang.org/book/unsafe.html https://doc.rust-lang.org/book/unsafe.html There are just 3 things it allows you to do, but that's all it takes to get the necessary bits of potential-foot-shooting bits out of C/C++. One simple use case for dereferencing a raw pointer is if you're working with an embedded system. You know (through specs) that address 0x00b1 in memory corresponds to a physical button press on the development board, so you write a loop that continuously dereferences this address and does something based on whether the dereferenced value is 0 (pressed) or 1 (unpressed). As far as the source level is concerned, you're just dereferencing a magic address pointing at who knows what value over and over again and never changing that value either. "Unsafe" tells the compiler that you know what you're doing. (And sometimes even in C/C++ you'll need the 'volatile' keyword to keep their compilers from optimizing the dereference to only happen once out of the loop.)