"Actual systems programming" mostly does not involve unsafe code. For example, most OS code is _not_ interrupt hooks or malloc but the rest of the OS. Most of

"Actual systems programming" mostly does not involve unsafe code. For example, most OS code is _not_ interrupt hooks or malloc but the rest of the OS. Most of Postgres is not reading data quickly, but higher-level abstractions. Large-scale systems programming will always be mostly higher-level abstractions, because that's the only way to write large programs. Name any "systems programming" OSS project, choose a random C file, and you'll see that most code does not require pointer arithmetic except because that's how you do things in C. You don't bit-twiddle for 200k lines of code, so being able to limit dangerous stuff like that to the 5k lines that actually need it makes work an order of magnitude easier.