Unsafe Rust really just let's you play with pointers
This is the entirety of what Unsafe Rust allows
- Dereference a raw pointer
- Call an unsafe function or method
- Access or modify a mutable static variable
- Implement an unsafe trait
- Access fields of unions
Yes Rust is harder to write than C, that's basically by design as it's due to the statically guaranteed memory safety. That's pretty magical. C doesn't have that and neither does C++ even with smart pointers and such. Rusts unsafe keyword is poorly named, what it actually does is tell the compiler that you the programmer guarantee Rusts rules are upheld within the unsafe block.
For example
That is a global, that's incredibly hard to impossible to statically prove it's safely done, so you have to do it in an unsafe block. So you violating Rusts rules within an unsafe block is actually using the unsafe block wrong. That's not what it's for