I am not a Rust expert, but I've written kernel modules in it so I've had to deal with interacting with the foreign function interface and didn't have the benef

I am not a Rust expert, but I've written kernel modules in it so I've had to deal with interacting with the foreign function interface and didn't have the benefit of any of its standard library. The basic answer on this is you can specify that structures in rust have the same representation as a comparable C structure. If this isn't good enough for your use case (and it isn't when representing some wire format), then there are additional keywords to more precisely define the packing. Of course, it's also possible to just have a binary blob of the appropriate size and write the appropriate values at the appropriate offset inside of it. Generally I've been able to do whatever I need to do in Rust. I also wouldn't discount wrapping some C code at the very lowest layers. This isn't very different than using C code in a C++ project. Yes, it weakens type safety, but at the end of the day we have to get shit done, no? To the higher level point of whether or not it's worth learning rust: I don't know. How much time do you spend implementing and how much time do you spend fixing? Rust increases the former and decreases the latter.