If I were targeting Rust for compilation, I wouldn't do lifetimes, instead everything would be unsafe Rust using raw pointers.

I'd have to do an actual project to see how annoying it is to lower semantics to unsafe Rust to know for sure, but my guess is you'd be slightly better off because you don't have to work around implicit conversions in C, the more gratuitous UBs in C, and I think I'd prefer the slightly more complete intrinsic support in Rust over C.