But honestly, I think danger from that is wildly overstated. The author isn’t talking about implementing an ECS or b-tree here. They’re just populating an array from a file when the program launches, then freeing the whole thing when the program terminates. It’s really not rocket science.
The other big advantage of this approach is that you don’t have to deal with unsafe rust. So, no unsafe {} blocks. No wrangling with rust’s frankly awful syntax for following raw pointers. No stressing about whether or not a future version of rust will change some subtle invariant you’re accidentally depending on, or worrying about if you need to use MaybeInit or something like that. I think the chance of making a mistake while interacting with unsafe code is far higher than the chance of misusing an array index. And the impact is usually worse.
The author details running into exactly that problem while coding - since they assumed memory allocated by vec would be pinned (it isn’t). And the program they ended up with still doesn’t use pin, even though they depend on the memory being pinned. That’s cause for far more concern than a simple array index.
