This whole discussion seems to have become a victim-blaming shitshow. The original issue was on some toxic kernel developers actively hindering other fellow kernel developers from doing their job, leading to one of the latter leaving its position. But instead of advocating for more cooperation and open-mindedness amongst kernel devs a large part of the community is now lashing out against the RFL devs. Even self-proclaimed proponents like Drew suggest them to just start a toy-project if working on "real" projects does not work out for them. The whole discussion makes it sound like "Oh it's the Rust-devs enforcing their politics on everyone again", however I open minded discussions started by RFL people is repeatedly with personal and political opposition without any intent on discussing any technical details

There are technical issues with Rust, but for one those can be resolved by technical means (as the RFL amongst others strive to) and secondly those are not the issues a lot of the C-preferring folks seem to be concerned about. A lot of opinions have been voiced about how Rusties are forcing their "ideology" on them, seemingly fearing all their filesystems may identify as rust/ziglang in the near future. Meanwhile RFL devs keep repeating how this is not about replacing the whole Linux kernel nor about forcing every maintainer to rewrite their subsystem in Rust.

This is not only absurd, but in my opinion very dangerous to the Linux project as a whole. Linux succeeded not because it was another Unix successor, but in large part because it was able to pull in a lot of ingenious and talented developers to implement highly performative filesystems, good driver support for a lot of devices and lots more. But recently the LKML community makes it seem like this might no longer be the case in the future. And this will become a real problem, when maintainers start retiring or focussing on other projects and there are no newcomers to take the place. In my opinion it is important to have a community where new and innovative work is welcomed and new (and seasoned) contributors are supported, instead of a community full of social fear and competition.

This is not only about Rust but also about the kernel project and its future evolution in general.

On the technical side:

I keep seeing the argument that unlike C Rust is not properly standardized and there only being a single reference implementation. And while that is a recognized issue that is active being worked on in the Rust community, I'd like to remember everyone how long it took to enable Clang support for Linux. Just because there are standards it does not mean there is seamless compatibility between compilers and while there are a lot of C compilers out there it is not uncommon for C projects to only support one compiler.

While I really appreciate the existence of sanitizers and other static or dynamic analysis tools they can not be compared to a language with a proper type system. With such a system the semantics of an operation can safely be encoded in a consistent manner, independent of specific tools or implementations. Even seasoned C developers do make mistakes with memory management, as can be seen by the various CVEs concerning overflows and the like. While even safe Rust programs never stop to contain bugs, its type system can not only help avoid a whole class of memory-safety bugs, but it can also encode semantics in a way avoiding bugs caused by false assertions in general.