You’re taking C extremely literally, and compilers are not required to do this (for example, if the array is being iterated sequentially, multiple loads may be done at once). Similarly, in Rust a function call is not necessarily going to actually compile to a function call: it is expected that the access compiles down to something very close to what C would do. The syntax is an abstraction, rather than a normative designation to the compiler for how it should generate code.