[JoshTriplett]

> It's not necessary for functionality. It's just an optimization. One that needs to be justified with benchmarks.

I've worked with people who have the benchmarks to back it up; pointer traversals are expensive.

> people who write unsafe code think they're cool

I've tended to find the opposite: most of the Rust programmers I run into treat unsafe code as an occasionally necessary evil, and every time they write it they think about how the landscape could be improved so they wouldn't have had to, or how to encapsulate it in a separate crate with a small surface area.