It seems to be a common view amongst the Reg commentariat that Rust is snake oil and its proponents are pushy chancers. I get it - I have thirty years of experience in software development that have imbued me with a deep distrust of people offering silver bullets for our software engineering problems. I'm also aware that the term "silver bullet" accompanying a technology that over promises but under delivers predates my time as a professional programmer since I have books by the likes of Fred Brooks and Brad Cox that discuss it.
However, I feel Rust is seriously misrepresented on these forums and that the Rust for Linux project is particularly maligned for the wrong reasons. I've followed the evolution of both the language and the attempt to get it usable for Linux kernel development with interest, since as much as I love C (after all, it was the first programming language I properly learned) I'm painfully aware of its shortcomings.
The Rust for Linux folk knew they faced an uphill battle to get support for it in the kernel, but they probably assumed they could succeed on merit alone as long as they minimised the burden on those with little to no interest in it. What they probably didn't expect, and seems to be playing out, is how downright obstructive some subsystem maintainers would be (Hellwig and Ts'o in particular). The Rust folk have acknowledged they can't make demands on those maintainers to give concessions to their specific needs, and as a result have shouldered the burden of keeping Rust bindings separated while dealing with the fluid (some would say downright unstable) APIs of those subsystems.
Frankly, I'd prefer the Rust for Linux folk to just say "fuck it" and focus instead on something like the FreeBSD kernel, as at this point it feels much more like a meritocracy than the Linux kernel development world. The fact is though that Linux has far more momentum and therefore broader hardware support, so I can understand why it is the more attractive proposition for innovation.