It'd be very hard to make a statement like "Rust can do X that C can't" without there being a statement "You can do Y, then Z in C and that is like X" because c

It'd be very hard to make a statement like "Rust can do X that C can't" without there being a statement "You can do Y, then Z in C and that is like X" because clearly they are both Turing complete languages at the end of the day. So I'll instead just give reasons why people might prefer to program in Rust: - Memory management / safety (no GC, variable lifetimes are tracked by the compiler, no dangling, no null pointer ...) - Ergonomics (built-in unit tests, feature-full std lib, unicode strings, modern dependency manager, more formalized macros ...) - Functional-lite (you must explicitly discard unused enum variants, the "null" value is an enum variant ...) Long story short: Rust makes it really easy to write sound software. I think you see that on crates.io where Rust packages are hosted. Lots of packages quickly reach maintenance mode and receive very few updates, but remain extremely useful. Once you've written (compiled) something in Rust, you feel much more confident that is is free of latent runtime bugs. Without commenting on whether or not this is necessary or good for the Linux kernel, I'll say that there are probably many devs out there that feel like working other non GC languages feels like pulling teeth after having worked with Rust. And that might be part of the pressure.