[lolinder]

If the end state were unsafe Rust, you'd be right, but that's explicitly not the intended end state. Unsafe Rust was the reachable first step. Now they have a Rust version and can iteratively remove `unsafe`, which they couldn't do before when it was in Zig.

[selfmodruntime]

It's the wrong abstraction though and I am kind of not surprised the Bun maintainers went way. The correct abstraction would be to translate into Rust while using `clone` and `copy` liberally and then iteratively converting to a borrowing model. Nowhere at all was an introduction of the `unsafe` keyword needed.

[lolinder]

That's only the correct abstraction if you intended to hold off on releasing the rewrite until you were completely finished, because there's no universe where Bun of all projects releases a production version that uses clone and copy liberally.

Unsafe in theory in a transliteration is only as unsafe as the original Zig was, which makes it a perfectly reasonable place to land as a transition point in a way that introducing large numbers of allocations simply isn't.