I'd say this is a case of the 'Inner platform' effect (Using a tool to build a poor replica of the tool) . Pointers are nothing more than indexes in the memory

I'd say this is a case of the 'Inner platform' effect (Using a tool to build a poor replica of the tool) . Pointers are nothing more than indexes in the memory array. It turns out keeping track of what index does what is so hard, rust has a borrow checker to help with that. But sometimes it's annoying, so we create a workaround, and if we go too far with that workaround, we forget why we had a borrow checker to begin with. Notice how the array technique has parallels to memory: You can have multiple arrays of different types a.k.a segmented memory. You can mark unused array objects, a.k.a. overwrite free'd memory with 0xDEADBEEF.