Are you sure about that? When backwards compatibility comes into the picture people tend to bend over backwards.

Backwards compatibility with what? Rust has always has had enum also for this exact case, to avoid encoding sentinels as strings or pointers.

you literally sound insane. its like an assembly fanboy saying C isn't any better because you could write inline asm, and therefore whatever bugs C prevents, well, it doesn't prevent them at all.

people like you are holding back software and security by decades.

im quite positive the only rust programmer who would do this is a C programmer who doesn't understand rust

why, because they all use agents to do the coding and don't check it?

because rust has features that makes doing it pointless.

in theory could someone do it? yeah, just like in theory someone could use unsafe and return a raw char pointer for some reason.

but in practice would anyone do it? no.