[tialaramex]

> I do sometimes miss how utterly simple and dumb C is

You can make an argument that the K&R C "is" an utterly simple and dumb language, but if it was it's long gone and it's also irrelevant for modern hardware.

Today because C only has a single kind of reference, the raw pointer, that means if you want references at all (which you do) you need pointers, and to get decent performance from this sort of language you need pointer provenance, and so now all your reference types involve understanding compiler internals minutiae. Bad luck though, those aren't specified in the C language standard, that's a TODO item from the turn of the century. The committee agrees that C pointers do have provenance but declines to explain how that could possibly work.

[Georgelemental]

To be fair, it's a very hard problem. Even in Rust, the formal model of how provenance works is very much WIP

[tialaramex]

Rust's Provenance itself stabilized, some time ago in fact, as basically the Tower of Weakenings. If you noticed the raw pointer provenance APIs are all marked stable since Rust 1.84, that's because the underpinning model is also stable - however the provenance rules do need to care about aliasing and Rust's aliasing rules are to some extent a WIP. So there is definitely a creaky floorboard in the specific case that you want to do pointer twiddling and your pointers might arguably alias and you'd like clarity about exactly where the line is on that.

I haven't seen places where they wanted this, but they definitely can exist. In the cases I'm thinking of any valid pointers are definitely unique (so no aliasing), or they're definitely pointing at something immutable (so aliasing is fine) or both and so there's no problem as I understand it.

There is an outstanding issue with LLVM - for any language including Rust - that it has unsound optimizations for pointers and this has implications for provenance tricks, but as I said that's not Rust specific and I think worse there are signs the same illness afflicts the GCC backend so maybe it's worse than "LLVM is buggy" and is a wider problem in how compiler developers have thought about this vague unspecified problem.