Yes, there's a case to be made that exposing "real" pointers in a GC'd language was a substantial mistake, but I guess it simplified _some_ parts of FFI. The trade-off so far maybe is fine, but it is a shame that there are certain things that can't be done without introducing new substantial costs. Maybe the compiler could learn to do something suuuper clever like recognize when pointers are being used non-transparently and automatically pin those, seems fraught with potential error though, trivial example being stuff like &a[0] (that ones easier to catch, others might not be).