[burntsushi]

Not necessarily at all. Go peruse the `regex` crate source code, including its dependencies.

The biggest `unsafe` sections are probably for SIMD accelerated search. There's no "unnatural abstractions" there. Just a memmem-like interface.

There's some `unsafe` for eliding bounds checks in the main DFA search loops. No unnatural abstractions there either.

There's also some `unsafe` for some synchronization primitives for managing mutable scratch space to use during a search. A C library (e.g., PCRE2) makes the caller handle this. The `regex` crate does it for you. But not for unnatural reasons. To make using regexes simpler. There are lower level APIs that provide the control of C if you need it.

That's pretty much it. All told, this is a teeny tiny fraction of the code in the `regex` crate (and all of its dependencies).

Finally, a demonstration of C-like speed: https://github.com/BurntSushi/rebar?tab=readme-ov-file#summa...

> Is is a tradeoff, not a silver bullet.

Uncontroversial.