Somewhat surprisingly, you can relatively quickly move from the world of raw pointers and direct hardware interaction to safe abstractions (or at least single-p

Somewhat surprisingly, you can relatively quickly move from the world of raw pointers and direct hardware interaction to safe abstractions (or at least single-point-of-unsafety, typically on construction, requiring that a pointer points to the right memory-mapped registers, etc). The series written by Phil Opp linked above does a great job of demonstrating this.