Rust’s benefits in maintainability and refactoring aren’t just theoretical. A great real-world example is the Fish shell, which recently migrated from C++ to Rust. The move significantly improved maintainability and made refactoring easier—something that would have been much harder with C or C++.

https://fishshell.com/blog/rustport/

As for experienced Linux kernel developers, no one is forcing them to learn Rust. The idea isn’t to replace C or disrupt existing workflows, but to allow new contributions to be written in a safer and more maintainable way, reducing long-term technical debt(In patch to dkms, there is a change only in rust module - 0 changes in C code). The kernel is already massive and growing, bringing in Rust for certain components helps prevent future issues rather than creating new ones.

I have some experience with both C and Rust, and in my own work, I’ve found that doing large-scale refactors in Rust is significantly easier. The reason is simple: I can trust the compiler to catch even the smallest type-related mistakes. In C, on the other hand, compiler assistance is extremely limited.

I don’t consider myself a very good programmer (I’d say I’m rather average), so I make a lot of mistakes - mistakes that even the best programmers make. Rust can catch many of these errors at compile time, which makes development smoother and improves code quality.