Note that Rust does not “solve” memory management for you, it just checks whether yours is memory safe. Initially you might rely on the borrow checker for those checks, but as you become more and more used to Rust you’ll start to anticipate it and write code that already safisfies it. So ultimately you’ll still learn how to safely deal with memory management, just in a different way.

“safe by default” can be done by starting your files with @safe:

Last time I heard about that it was much more limited than Rust, for example it even disallowed taking references to local variables. Has something changed since then?

But the one time I looked at a rust git repo I couldn’t even find where the code to do a thing was.

IMO that tells more about how the project was organized and names things than the language used.

So I think probably, the best way IS to go the way linus did. Just go ahead and write a very basic working kernel in rust. If the project is popular it will gain momentum.

As the other commenter pointed out, there’s Redox. The issue is that this completly disregards an incremental approach: you have to rewrite everything before it comes usable, you can’t do it piece by piece. Currently the approach of Rust for Linux is not even to rewrite things, but to allow writing new drivers in Rust.

Trying to slowly adapt parts of the kernel to rust and then complain when long term C developers don’t want to learn a new language in order to help isn’t going to make many friends on that team.

Have you seen the conference video? That’s not just refusal to learn a new language, it’s open hostility. And it’s not the only instance, for example Asahi Lina also reported unreasonable behaviour by some maintainers just because she wrote Rust code, even when Rust was not involved.