My understanding is that most of Rust's standard library translates to the same blocking calls on Linux, so it would be plagued with the same issues as C would

My understanding is that most of Rust's standard library translates to the same blocking calls on Linux, so it would be plagued with the same issues as C would be. (And the solution reached in the article would similarly work in Rust.) There are certainly async I/O libraries for Rust (e.g., Tokio), but those are going to be limited by the primitives the OS gives them. (AFAIK, Tokio's core libraries don't directly do async disk I/O; there is tokio-fs, and it does it by shunting the work to a threadpool.) The fact that disk I/O is so uniquely special on Linux effects any language, as it is an aspect of the kernel itself. I love Rust, and while there are a ton of compelling reasons to use it, I don't think it's fair to say it would have prevented this from happening, in this particular case.