If anyone is considering working on an OS in Rust, they could perhaps consider writing a small hypervisor that could replace Xen, Nova and similar hypervisors.

If anyone is considering working on an OS in Rust, they could perhaps consider writing a small hypervisor that could replace Xen, Nova and similar hypervisors. This provides the same low-level challenges of writing a kernel, but it's far easier to get practically usable software than attempting to replace Linux and would actually be useful in practice. At the moment, the only way to make a sandbox that has a chance of being perfectly secure (i.e. no security holes, ever) while still running all kinds of useful software is to use VMs to sandbox Linux/Windows kernels, and here the hypervisor is of course the weak point, and current usable hypervisors are written in C or C++.