unsafe does not disable the borrow checker. It does however give you abilities to circumvent it, namely by letting you dereference pointers, which are not subject to the borrow checker.

Sure, but isn’t this in a dependency? Can’t be reached when only importing your crate anyways? And if you’re building a binary, I don’t think this could really considered exported, is what I mean :)

Actually, dead code eliminination should do the trick, if you’re compiling a binary at least (same for a library I think, but there could be re-exports there). Did you compile in release mode?