You’re not wrong. Back in the day, you didn’t have alternatives with zero-cost abstractions like we have today. There are many valid reasons why one would make

You’re not wrong. Back in the day, you didn’t have alternatives with zero-cost abstractions like we have today. There are many valid reasons why one would make decisions to balance performance against memory-safety, especially 25 years ago – and given the fact that networking code tends to be part of hot paths where optimization matters.