Rust's primitives are all thin wrappers on top of libpthread. The difference is that the type system ensures you don't forget them, and makes it harder to misus

Rust's primitives are all thin wrappers on top of libpthread. The difference is that the type system ensures you don't forget them, and makes it harder to misuse them (such as accessing data without locking its mutex, or mutating shared memory in a non-atomic way). And even if you think you never make mistakes, and it's always the other programmers who are the problem, Rust keeps other peoples' code in check too.