I'm really curious why there aren't more enterprise-grade, production ready kernels at this point. Isn't Rust nearing maturity? Doesn't the community have tonnes of enterprise ready C code that could be used as a reference (ie. Linux, BSD) of "what not to do"?

I'm not trying to start an argument here, I think the world knows that C/C++ make it way too easy to shoot ourselves in the foot by now. I know that writing operating systems is hard and takes a long time, i've written my own prototype single and multitasking operating systems for x86_32, 68k, Z80, 6502 etc. I'm aware that Rust support has been added to recent Linux kernels, for the limited use case of writing secure device drivers. None of these things are news to me, so please don't regurgitate these points.

But given the great body of reference that is available, the enthusiasm in the Rust community for the promise of more secure operating system kernels, I'm genuinely suprised that things aren't further along. Yes I'm aware of Redox, but it seems more aimed at desktop use, and last time I tried it didn't even boot.

Projects in C/C++ seem to be making much faster progress eg. SerenityOS than the Rust community. What is holding Rust back in this area? This is a genuine question, not intending to inflame the discussion. I'm spending some time learning Rust as I can afford, but am not opinionated one way or the other yet.

Where are all the Linux replacements that I would have imagined to be up and running by now given Rust's maturity? What am I missing here? Happy to be genuinely informed.

I kind of expected there to be a bunch of projects in flight by now, ala bazaar style, with the Rust community starting to conglomerate around the strongest contenders and move them forward at a rapid pace.

I mean, there are several rust kernel/os projects in progress.

One project that's pushing on the boundary of safety and composability is Thesus, which takes language safety to new ground by shifting traditionally OS-level responsibilities like resource management all the way down to typechecks in the language, and also explores a way of updating any core OS component on a live running system. https://github.com/theseus-os/Theseus

There's also KataOS which google just recently announced: https://opensource.googleblog.com/2022/10/announcing-kataos-...

As you note, these things take time, I agree with sibling that none of them are likely to be "enterprise-grade" or "production ready" this decade.