Comment Re:embarrassing what qualifies as a programmer (Score 1, Insightful) 50
It is not, it's what is lived with in a codebase, C has nothing to do with it. Also, there is nothing about an approach mandated by one language that cannot be implemented in C, Rust creators have not made anything that kernel developers cannot otherwise do.
C has everything to do with it. C requires that programmers be infallible. They're not. They never have been. They never will be.
Rust's designers understand that programmers are human and will always make mistakes so the language allows and even requires building safe zero-cost abstractions that allow the compiler to check for huge swathes of common mistakes. Rust isn't the first language to do that, by any means, but it's the first language that (a) does it consistently and thoroughly (C++ fails this test), (b) is efficient enough for low-level system and kernel coding (managed-runtime languages fail this test) and (c) has achieved sufficiently-broad adoption (many niche languages fail this test).