The use cases I saw were memory alloc, but I admit not being too familiar with its common uses. The other uses I saw were just for perf improvement over existin

The use cases I saw were memory alloc, but I admit not being too familiar with its common uses. The other uses I saw were just for perf improvement over existing synchronization/reflection approaches. While I agree that performance is often essential, I don't think the gains from unsafe measurably affected the language's success. Even without, the performance was still a draw compared to many other high level options. If anything, I do think it kept a bunch of libs from dipping into JNI.