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> everything further out is playing with fire.

That's the point. C and C++ don't prevent you from playing with that for. Memory-safe language do.

Rust only requires you to wrap it in unsafe. And I think C# allows you to do some pretty crazy stuff too.

The Kestrel web server[0] is an example of a codebase that makes extensive use of C#'s unsafe functionality. UnmanagedBufferAllocator[1], for example, looks pretty similar to how you'd write it in C++.

[0] https://github.com/dotnet/aspnetcore/tree/1a56bdb671700ae698...

[1] https://github.com/dotnet/aspnetcore/blob/1a56bdb671700ae698...

C# cleanly separates pointers into Java-style managed references that are opaque, and C-style unmanaged pointers that are transparent but can only be used inside "unsafe" blocks.

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