The biggest pushback was with C++. Why? Because when these discussions still started, C++ codebases tended to be a mess. It didn't help that C++11 was coming u

The biggest pushback was with C++. Why? Because when these discussions still started, C++ codebases tended to be a mess. It didn't help that C++11 was coming up and support was wildly inconsistent among compilers. Ultimately it was still possible to write unsafe code though. The landscape has now changed and Rust has now positioned itself as a language that actually does have very key advantages (in correctness and safety). While C++ has made large strides, its advantages now lie elsewhere (eg; drawing on a wealth of performant libraries-- something that the kernel has less of a sue of).