[likeclockwork]

Is Rust the only programming language that is usable for this work?

[sarlalian]

No, however it makes driver development easier and all the work to date is in rust, so changing languages would be exceedingly painful.

[rollcat]

So far nearly all of the kernel/driver code in the modern (~1990+?) history of osdev has been written in C/C++. However it appears that Rust can make you incredibly productive, at the very least in experimental/explorative development based solely on reverse engineering.

It's promising.