As mentioned in the article, it's entirely possible to create a raw pointer to an object in safe rust, you just can't do much with it. One thing you can do with it though is convert it to an integer and reveal a randomized base address, which isn't possible in some other languages without their "unsafe" features. Of course, this follows naturally from Rust's definition of what is safe, but I remember being kind of surprised by it when I first learned Rust and didn't understand those definitions yet.

It would be pretty interesting to me if someone wrote a survey of what different languages consider to be "unsafe", including specific operations like this. For example, it looks like "sizeof" is relegated to the "unsafe" package in Go, which strikes me as strange.[1] I'd love to read a big comparison.

[1]: https://pkg.go.dev/unsafe#Sizeof