The point here is using types that are still fast and memory efficient without having to resort to brittle pointer magic full of gotchas. You still have raw buffers, and they're still efficient, but you just don't have to do malloc or memcpy all over the place to make them work the way you want.

The way I see it, much of Rust, and this project specifically, is not about moving to a higher abstraction... It's about moving to the right abstraction.

Yes, I could have switched to just about anything else, and end up with an even higher level code. But that would defeat the purpose of keeping it small, fast, and memory conscious.