I appreciate the explanation! I'm a noob at this sort of thing. (My experience with pointers is limited to MMIO and C FFI).

Regarding trusting the programmer: is that in the context of pointers, or more broadly? I'm betting I'm missing more, e.g. maybe mutation control too across threads/cores etc? Or as a broad design principle? (I have written some Zig as a learning dive, but don't Grok it, as am waiting for some core functionality like HALs, GUI libs, 3D libs etc. Was also a bit miffed by the 'operator overloading will never be allowed' as the use cases where I use low level languages have a near total overlap with the ones where I use vectors, quaternions, and matrices.

Stated another way: I learned with higher level langs first, which I believe biased my mental model. Example: Say I want to use a C library in my rust program/lib. (Example: CMSIS DSP). One of the actions I take in the wrapper is convert the pointer to an array ref; my mental model is the param is a list of items; it is divorced from memory. If I want to read/write a reg, or access FLASH, that's where I look to pointers. I e I think zig vs others is about if you want to conflate or divorce collections and memory.