[alphaglosined]

This article was not created based upon theory.

It was created based upon real world experience having designed and implemented it in D. Where all of your concerns have not been discussed in the years following that article (it was already in the language for about 8 years at that point aka the start and has been solidly proven to work in the exact same context as it would have done in C).

In D at least, you can grab the pointer by a simple .ptr and for length .length. To get a specific element, it is as you would expect &f[i] all nice and straight forward. But what if you want to create an array from malloc? In D that is easy, just slice it! malloc(len)[0 .. len]. And free is just as you would expect from above, free(array.ptr);