Rust's type system provides protections against some problems that can be quite hard to debug in C.

Between having a programmer that is inexperienced in C writing C code and having a programmer inexperienced in Rust writing Rust code, arguably you might be better off with the latter.

This sounds like a reasonably small component, so what is the worst that could happen? That you would have to rewrite it some day? I'd say go for it.

Yep, the experiments described in http://www.ted.com/talks/marcus_byrne_the_dance_of_the_dung_beetle.html suggest dung beetles also use polarized light.

Really? I remember reading Magister has a respectable-but-far-from-monopolistic market share of 10%, and there seem to be various options available, including the web-based SOM (formerly Vocus, http://product.simaconderwijs.nl/Onze_producten/SOM ). Of course they'll differ in scope, but there certainly seems to be competition.

(full disclosure: i work for a sister-company of the company that develops SOM)

JSR 305 defines a set of annotations that allow you to do this (including '@NonNull' for method return values).

The weakness of this is that you can formally specify a method should never return 'null' with this, but the compiler does not check whether you live up to this promise. There are tools that can do some basic checks against blatant mistakes (Eclipse does this nowadays), and tools that are a bit more advanced and find even more subtle mistakes (FindBugs comes to mind).

Really proving correctness without a doubt is an unsolved problem - even when adding additional annotations it's a tough nut to crack - check out research projects like ESC/Java if you're interested in the gory details

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Actually, most of the platform has been open-sourced by Sun before the takeover under the 'OpenJDK' name.

Indeed, GNU now carries a 'headnote' to the article explaining the new situation: http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/java-trap.html

The situation is still messy - but not for the original reasons laid out in that article. If worst came to worst, the JVM can be forked - but forking a widely-used platform is a whole other can of worms, of course.

Take a browse though http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/Electrical-Engineering-and-Computer-Science/index.htm There doesn't seem to be an 'overview' class like the one you're describing, but perhaps you could combine some of the introductions of the various courses.