Raw Pointers

C developers may first read unsafe as “the place where Rust lets me write C.”

That is too broad.

unsafe does not disable all Rust checks, and it does not turn a block back into C. It permits a small set of operations the compiler cannot prove safe, such as dereferencing raw pointers, calling FFI functions, and accessing mutable global state.

The key question is not whether unsafe can be written. It is how small the unsafe boundary can be.