The rust community is naturally happy to help out, but I can't even imagine us being able to drive this sort of work...
But you are right, this is not coming from the Rust community itself. In fact, several independent groups have been thinking of using Rust in one way or another for kernel purposes, as early as... 2013 (!), e.g. from Taesoo Kim:
https://github.com/tsgates/rust.ko/commit/58f0fb8fdf4063f5b24a09cbfeec81bf28a9d81b
At the moment, in the project we have a mixture of people that come from a Rust or kernel background, which has been great. And most of us have used many languages in our work, not just Rust. Personally, most of my career has been around C++ and Python.
It has an implication that Linux is something that any enthusiastic group of outsiders could force their changes into. And that there are rust people would create such a group of outsiders.
It has an implication that rust people and linux people are disjoint sets.
It's generally taking this strange adversarial view to a collaborative endeavour. People aren't "rustaceans" or not, it's not a sports team. People are people, they generally program in a wide variety of languages, and use whatever they think is best given a certain context.
I'm not sure if I've fully captured what seems "off" to me about the comment, but hopefully you get the gist.
As for asking questions, that's a clear example of https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Just_asking_questions - but at the same time the general sentiment seems to be frequently reflected in internet comments. I don't think it's a malicious case of this, just how they chose to express their opinions.
To clarify, I didn't mean suspicious in the sense of expecting malicious behavior, rather than in the sense of not being overly optimistic about this type of progress, because I think it is very hard to incorporate new tooling/languages despite their merits.
In other words: it would be nice to see this being fruitful, because it would possibly a strong, positive signal for programming and programming languages in general, but I'm cautious or "suspicious" still.
When I learned rust I thought it felt more C-like than C++ to be honest. Nowadays I’m pretty happy to be in this c to rust to c loop.
I think you’re exactly right about c++ not offering much benefit to someone like Linus. It’s much simpler than c++. Rust has also informed the way I write C (granted, I’ve also gained more experience along the way, but rust forced me to have more discipline for sure).
I mean, "it seems like our technology should fit this domain, let's see if we can help them use it" isn't so strange as conspiracies go.
That's not my definition of long history! My first Linux kernel was just pre 2.0 and I used make config. Actually I used make config for quite a while before it got out of hand and I started keeping copies of the config to work from instead of doing it from scratch each time I did an upgrade.
I'm not the sharpest tool ...
It's long in comparison to Rust!
Rust is not time served and it needs to grow up. Initial signs are positive. We are at the cooing stage over a pretty child that may either be the Messiah (a Naughty Boy) or decide to throw its poo at its parents and stick to licking windows.
Time will tell.