I'm an embedded Rust developer, and was a little confused by this paper until I noticed it was written in 2015. There are now solutions to a number of the problems they pose both at the language level and the library level:

Here's one in particular:

    In principal, this would allow us to statically allocate 
    a buffer sized for each particular closure. 

    Unfortunately, there is no size_of keyword in Rust,
    and static initialization cannot invoke functions—
    in this case the function size_of<T>() -> usize provided
    by the Rust core library.

This can be solved by using the lazy_static crate:

https://github.com/rust-lang-nursery/lazy-static.rs

From the description in the README:

    Using this macro, it is possible to have statics that 
    require code to be executed at runtime in order to be 
    initialized. 

Hey look, it's exactly what they need! It's also "no_std" compatible and can work just fine in a kernel-like context.

Take this paper with a grain of salt: it's a bit dated at this point, and there are solutions for a number of the problems posed.