The article covers both of your points: > Rust is supposed to be an excellent systems programming language, having the ability to go extremely close to the bar

The article covers both of your points: > Rust is supposed to be an excellent systems programming language, having the ability to go extremely close to the bare metal, while offering a thick layer of security and expressiveness which C lacks of. And such an assumption has to be trialled! > Which Philipp Oppermann has already done by beginning to write a real OS in Rust and writing about it. But this is not a realistic trial: an OS starting from scratch has almost zero chance to end up being finished, not to mention being actually used on real machines. That is, a more accurate title might be "Proof of concept of incrementally rewriting the Linux kernel in Rust".