[ojeda]

To be fair, I was just a teenager back then and I was out of kernel development for quite a few years afterwards.

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

There were others: John Baublitz had a external kernel module going on, Samantha Miller also worked on enabling a FUSE-like API to write filesystems in Rust, etc. And, of course, Alex Gaynor & Geoffrey Thomas had the most mature Rust abstractions for external kernel modules.

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.