That's funny, I always thought that GHC's lack of support for shared libraries and requiring static linking were serious obstacles to its adoption, but people are actually asking for this kind of thing now?

If you want to re-use any of the huge number of mature C libraries out there, you will need to link against glibc anyway.

Directly invoking system calls is quite the violation of the UNIX philosophy :)

May be I misunderstood something, but dropping dependency on glibc doesn't imply static linking.

Of course reusing C library means linking with libc and reusing C++ library means linking with libstdc++. But in a long perspective those libraries should be implemented with Rust to have all advantages of the better language.

And using rust without libc might help with some embedded use-cases, where people don't want to put unnecessary stuff. Rust as a 0-cost systems language theoretically could be used there instead of C.

Does Rust have a UNIX dependency? If not, I don't see what the UNIX philosophy has to do with anything.

Possibly glibc itself, but not a libc in general. While it's true that Rust can make system calls itself (though inline assembly isn't stable yet), we're not interested in re-implementing all of that.