correct, I'm familiar with TockOS, and my point is 100% accurate. TockOS is on a microcontroller, and it must use unsafe in some form to access the peripherals. I'm not claiming that applications in the "userspace" of TockOS would need to use unsafe to access those peripherals. I said someone would have to build the safe abstraction on top of the unsafety, which in this case would normally fall to TockOS.

But, if we take this blog post's statistics to their logical extreme, we can easily asset that no crates on crates.io are suitable for TockOS, since they all depend on libcore at a minimum, and libcore is certainly intent on safely abstracting unsafe code. Why should third party crates like byteorder be treated with such disdain? Obviously, if safety is your primary goal, then you should carefully review any unsafe code you depend on. They need to create a whitelist of acceptable third party crates -- ones who have been vetted, such as byteorder and libcore.