[phkahler]

Even in that case it's not pointless. You can do a lot of testing and fuzzing with checks enabled to get some confidence that you don't have bugs. Then disable the checks for performance. That's just one option. I think it's nice to have options even if I choose not to use them.

Even better is to use iterators and other abstractions that don't require bounds checking at all. Rust has lots of good tools to build efficient code.