Check out the excellent tutorial # Learn Rust With Entirely Too Many Linked Lists especially chapters five and six. It has a lot more words, it’s entertaining, engaging, and informative.

But if you are doing something advanced, down at the hardware level

This part is wrong. Otherwise yes correct.

The “unsafe” code in rust is allowed to access memory locations in ways that skip the compiler’s check and guarantee that that memory location has valid data. They programmer is on their own to ensure that.

Which as you say is just the normal state of affairs for all C code.

This is needed not because of hardware access but just because sometimes the proof that the access is safe is beyond what the compiler is able to represent.

Try to find a big rig truck wash near your location on Google maps. I cannot. Only 57 million car washes and no way to filter them out.

Edit: lo and behold: “big rig truck wash” is the magic phrase it turns out. “Truck wash”, “Semi truck wash”, “semi truck wash -car” don’t work but “big rig truck wash” does.

Fuck you Google, you waste my time.