> I'm talking specifically about an unmapped page. I don't have any data, but I'm pretty confident access to an unmapped page (such as null pointers) is a much more common source of SIGSEGV in general than unaligned access, to the extent that most programmers probably don't even know the latter is a possibility.

The function is already full of UB as we know it. You can add one more UB to the pile if you like.

> I take a pretty hard stance on this kind of thing.

That’s a valid choice that you can make, as is writing code in Rust. But what’s you’re doing is criticizing the design of an API that you have no actual knowledge of. For all we know this function is an internal function, not exported for use elsewhere, buried in some other code which performs the appropriate checks. We know, from the article, that other checks are performed elsewhere in the code, because it’s explicitly mentioned.

“Taking a hard stance” is all fine when you are writing or reviewing code, but in this case this kind of criticism is just noise. Save it for when you see a complete enough picture that your disagreements are more than just stylistic.