Fully agreed. At some point you have to draw a line and say that the rest is the responsibility of the kernel and hardware and user, and I think Fil-C drew that line in the right place.

If we strip away the semantic maneuvering, your argument becomes this: Rust is unsafe because it lets people who aren't you, Pizlo, write unsafe code. Safety means trusting only you with machine code.

Anyone could do the same with a Rust lint rule if he wanted. He wouldn't, because this policy is not the way to secure software.

How does it compare to the equivalent code in Typescript, Go or C#? Those languages all have “safe” syscall wrappers too, for a subset of syscalls.