[mjg59]

I think your understanding is correct - for Rust to work well in Linux, the C maintainers need to maintain more discipline than has been absolutely required before (in that if they've changed those semantics then any breakage has been largely silent and any bugs created have potentially been subtle), and changing that is a social problem more than a technical one because there's no technical mechanism to enforce the same rigor on C. The attempted tradeoff of "The bindings are up to the Rust developers" is something that only really works if the C developers are willing to accept that additional constraint.

(To be clear I have spent many nights drinking with Christoph and think he's entirely in the wrong here)