ioctl() forever?

ioctl() forever?

And underlying that is that electrical safety is a mature and well-understood field. The physics involved in a GFCI or an overcurrent breaker have been well-understood since the 19th century, and the physics required for an AFCI were fully settled before World War I in 1914. There's nothing in any NEC-compliant installation that a good physicist from 1920 couldn't fully understand and explain - although they'd be amazed by the manufacturing techniques involved (and would be seriously shocked by the IC in an AFCI, even though they could explain the physical principles that underpin its operation).

In contrast, logic design (both software and hardware) is a rapidly evolving field even today - Rust's type system is based atop affine logic from the 1970s, and there's mathematics I'm aware of that's probably relevant to programming language design that was only formulated rigorously in the last 20 years, and where there's active leading-edge research trying to determine if it's useful, and if so, how.

I'd also agree on the "throw it at the wall and see if it sticks" thing - the only time, IME, that engineers actually seriously bother with the rigorous analysis that's possible for something like a GFCI is when you're cost-optimizing it. Otherwise, it's considered too much work, when you can take a design that's probably overkill but meets requirements and ship it.