The OP's argument is bunk. It's been said many times too over the years. The fact is that the index approach does not give up everything. The obvious thing it d

The OP's argument is bunk. It's been said many times too over the years. The fact is that the index approach does not give up everything. The obvious thing it doesn't give up is safety. It's true you can still get bugs via out of bounds accesses, but it won't result in undefined behavior. You get a panic instead. This is how the regex crate works internally and uses almost no `unsafe`.