[______-_-______]

Exactly this. I'm not sure what the author's practical goal is with that code. He rejects #[repr(C)] a few times, so it's not FFI.

Yes, working with uninitialized memory is tedious. But that isn't something you ever have to do. If you're translating some C to Rust, write it using Rust idioms, instead of trying to preserve every call to malloc/free and every access to uninitialized memory.

[jerf]

The point is to make points in a simple environment.

Anything small enough to clearly make points about unsafe Rust is almost certainly small enough to be done in safe Rust, defeating the purpose.

[malf]

If it’s too big for an example, it’s almost certainly too big for “trust me, I know this is safe”.

[albrewer]

I don't see how you can make this claim. An example is meant to be understandable after a cursory introduction and communicate an idea to the reader. If it takes me a day to understand the "example", it's not useful as an example, but real problems often take that long to completely understand in any language.