the choice is also between a good language and a bad one. Those two choices are not exclusive, and choosing good practices is not the end of the road for the quest for quality.
"Move to Rust!" is not a productive or helpful suggestion, unless you have an massive army of programmers ready to port Linux to Rust.
EDIT: Downvotes eh? Then I suppose I'll state outright what I left implicit: Linux is not inextricably tied to any single language, and it's a strawman to suppose that any attempt to integrate Rust with Linux would first have to reinvent the universe from scratch. Rust has excellent interoperability with C (though, notably, unions are iffy), and it's common to write Rust code that gets called from C with C being none the wiser.
>Linux is not inextricably tied to any single language
It is pretty tightly coupled to GCC, which, as you know, is a C compiler. Some people are working on supporting Clang, but last I heard they haven't succeeded.
It would certainly be interesting to see someone link Linux to Rust code though.
The LLVM build patchset is being actively maintained, here hare slides from February: https://events.linuxfoundation.org/sites/events/files/slides...
That's good though. Compiler freedom is better for everyone.