My guess is someone needs to step up and be the Linus of Rust code for Linux. It's the kind of thankless task that is invaluable, whoever can muster the courage to do it will be vital to Linux/Rust.
> someone needs to step up and be the Linus of Rust code for Linux
No. Better to have just Linus for Rust. Write a new OS in Rust unencumbered by C curmudgeons. As a bonus it won't be thankless but pretty exciting project on work on.
OS part is easy, there's an OS behind every other sofa in your closest university with software engineering classes. Getting people to write drivers for it is the hard part. Most OSes never boot outside of qemu.
Such new OS exists already (Redox). It's actually really good and can run modern DEs (Cosmic) and some recent commercial games (Balatro).
The problem with this direction is it dooms Linux to obsolescence. Thanks to Rust's memory safety, Redox has achieved a level of security and crash-resistance that Linux cannot hope to achieve with C. With everyone (including the US Govt) pushing for memory safe code, this has a negative impact on the whole world's major investments into Linux.
To mitigate the sunk costs, Linux needs to compete on memory safety. C has no viable solution so Rust is the only option.
Probably depends on what exactly you're looking for in a viable solution. Zig does not provide the same level of memory safety as Rust does (IIRC it doesn't protect against data races and doesn't offer (complete?) temporal memory safety), so if what Rust provides is the bare minimum you want Zig won't cut it.
