Why would hard-coding the ability to access a slice of bytes as ints into the compiler be safer than a well-encapsulated unsafe code abstraction? We used to im

Why would hard-coding the ability to access a slice of bytes as ints into the compiler be safer than a well-encapsulated unsafe code abstraction? We used to implement things like vectors directly in the compiler, but it was a big headache for no gain. Writing actual code is way easier than writing code to generate LLVM IR. Anyway, there is a commonly-used crate for this: byteorder. Had I written the library, I would have just used that crate. But it's not a big deal either way. > Why is there an "isize" (a signed quantity) in there? Because pointer arithmetic is signed. > The documentation for Rust's "std::ops::BitAnd" doesn't say what the semantics are for signed numbers Bitwise operations on signed integers are applied to their twos complement representations. > What would happen on a 32-bit machine if someone allocated a buffer bigger than 2GB? It would work. > Exploitable? No.