[nequo]

> My question was whether any programmers actually asked for it, and if so, which ones?

I have to admit, this question sounds very strange to me.

Corporations don't get work done. People do. Rust has been designed and implemented by programmers.[1] There's countless hours of talks and interviews and many articles and books written on Rust by programmers. They did all that work without being forced by anyone.

> All these restrictions that were in place to create a safer language made Pascal completely unsuited to writing allocators, buffered IO, and other OS internals. ... Maybe there's a lesson there.

Rust lets you do explicit type casting and write `unsafe` blocks in situations where you absolutely need to dereference raw pointers or do pointer arithmetic.[2] It lets you create null pointers or mark pointers as non-null. But not all code needs to do that. In Rust, you can isolate the code that does from the rest that doesn't.

[1] https://thanks.rust-lang.org/

[2] https://doc.rust-lang.org/std/ptr/index.html