[glowcoil]

You are missing something. For a piece of Rust software to run in any widely used computing environment, it is required to interface with a large body of non-Rust software via a non-typechecked ABI. Moreover, the Rust standard library itself contains many, many instances of the unsafe keyword. The benefits of Rust safety do not come from building a hermetically isolated tower of pure safe Rust code from the ground up, and those benefits do not become null and void the moment you include one C library used via FFI.

Rust safety is about being able to take an unsafe component, encapsulate its implementation details, and encode sound usage patterns for that component in a public API which can then be statically checked by the compiler. This allows the difficult problem of determining whether an entire codebase is sound, memory-safe, and free of undefined behavior to be factored into many smaller, more tractable problems of verifying that individual components are sound given their APIs. You can even do this with wrappers and bindings to C libraries, and there are many examples of this in the Rust ecosystem.