If you are just working with data, you can avoid unsafe completely. The issue is that for performant code, you often have to tap into linux libc stuff which doe

If you are just working with data, you can avoid unsafe completely. The issue is that for performant code, you often have to tap into linux libc stuff which doesn't guarantee safety. For example, if you try to to write something with packet_mmap for fast processing of traffic, you will have to use unsafes. Look at the Firecracker codebase. There are a lot of unsafe calls into libc. There is also a runtime reference counter which takes up cycles since it has to operate at run time.