This is one of the things that I feel is an inappropriate abstraction that is around for historical reasons. When I do FFI to call C from rust, I usually wrap the generated API (Which is pointer based) into rust's &[] array syntax. Arrays/lists/Vecs etc in most non-C languages feel like an abstraction over a collection of items; I feel like C's exposing the pointer directly is taking a low-level memory/MMIO operation and inserting it into business logic. Conceptually, I like to keep them separate; pointers for writing drivers, accessing registers, writing to flash memory etc. Arrays/lists/vecs for higher level operations on collections.

Tangent: I have a pet theory that part of Zig's raison d'etre is to fix some of the problems with C, while accommodating its pointer-based data structures, and the resulting patterns.

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vulcan01 2 hours ago | parent [-]

This talk – "Programming without pointers" – by Andrew Kelley may be interesting to you.

https://www.hytradboi.com/2025/05c72e39-c07e-41bc-ac40-85e83...

	▲	throwaway27448 an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Learning to program with pointers is enormously useful. It's simply bad software engineering to not use typing to enforce constraints on access to pointers (or addresses, or however you'd like to term them)