You misunderstand me: I don&#x27;t disagree that Rust is all about safe systems programming. I disagree that &quot;data race freedom&quot; is Rust&#x27;s (only) core guarantee, and I disagree that the &quot;seemingly arbitrary rules&quot; are about &quot;data race freedom&quot;. They&#x27;re about so much more, since the same rules get us memory safety as well, among other things.<p>I don&#x27;t think that Rust is trying to test out a programming paradigm or whatever, I&#x27;m saying that these &quot;seemingly arbitrary rules&quot; get us a lot of things, by proxy of a certain paradigm, and reducing it to &quot;data race freedom&quot; (when it&#x27;s so much more) is something we should avoid.<p>(My comment seems to focus on the discipline, I was just using it as a proxy for all of the things it gets us)