I recently had to write a lot of unsafe code in C# to interoperate with a driver.

As advanced as modern languages are, the excellent memory models only work within the language. Interoperability requires that you can work with memory directly when needed. (And only when needed.) I don't have a lot of Rust experience, but C# has plenty of tricks to avoid unsafe code but get close enough to working with real memory.

One thing that would help is if there was some kind of a tool that could take C header files, figure out how the structs and functions compile, and generate the Rust / C# structs and fuction signatures. This is such a time consuming task to do manually in C#, and novices screw it up all the time.

(I wish I had the time to do more work in Rust. It's a great concept!)

* https://github.com/rust-lang-nursery/rust-bindgen - Inputs are C/C++ headers, outputs are Rust type definitions and extern functions to interoperate with the type and functions in the headers

* https://github.com/immunant/c2rust - Inputs are C headers and source, outputs Rust code that is semantically equivalent to the C (modulo bugs, etc.)

* https://github.com/eqrion/cbindgen/ - Inputs are Rust source, outputs C/C++ headers that can be used to interoperate with the types and functions exposed by Rust