>which is strictly more dangerous than even C, never mind Zig

No it's not? The Rust burrow checker, the backbone of Rust's memory safety model, doesn't stop working when you drop into an unsafe block. From the Rust Book:

>To switch to unsafe Rust, use the unsafe keyword and then start a new block that holds the unsafe code. You can take five actions in unsafe Rust that you can’t in safe Rust, which we call unsafe superpowers. Those superpowers include the ability to:

    Dereference a raw pointer
    Call an unsafe function or method
    Access or modify a mutable static variable
    Implement an unsafe trait
    Access fields of a union

It’s important to understand that unsafe doesn’t turn off the borrow checker or disable any of Rust’s other safety checks: if you use a reference in unsafe code, it will still be checked. The unsafe keyword only gives you access to these five features that are then not checked by the compiler for memory safety. You’ll still get some degree of safety inside of an unsafe block.