Rust is definitely great for systems programming, and the speed is fantastic too.
Take a look at some of the system utility tools on crates.io, such as ripgrep (like grep), bat (like cat), fd-find (like find), lolcate-rs (like locate), procs (like ps).
All of those are MBs in size, compared to KBs for their C counterparts. Something needs to budge in Rust land for small utilities to be viable.
> All of those are MBs in size, compared to KBs for their C counterparts.
What difference does that make in the real world?
An order of magnitude difference... my ARM boards have 16 MB SPI flash. No way I am fitting more than a single rust binary on there.
You can certainly compile rust to fit on there without any trouble though, you just have to try... the same way you have to try to compile any language in that sort of environment really. You can get to about 30kb while still keeping the standard library [1], you can get something with a fully featured web server in a few hundred kb [2].