So just bypass the ownership checks, with `unsafe`. It gives up on memory safety, but you still keep all the other benefits of a modern language: algebraic data

So just bypass the ownership checks, with `unsafe`. It gives up on memory safety, but you still keep all the other benefits of a modern language: algebraic data types, pattern matching exhaustiveness checks, parametric polymorphism, etc. So, even when writing `unsafe` code, Rust is strictly superior to C and C++. Also, I would contend that, for the vast majority of programs, the benefits of a simple, hierarchical, statically enforceable resource management scheme like RAII outweigh the downsides. Programs that need more sophisticated approaches are a very small minority.