For someone who is completley not into OS programming but has heard a lot about safety and rust etc. etc.

Assuming the rust safety lives up to the type.

Is this (or any other project) likely to ever become a "real" useful os. What about including rust modules in the linux kernel? What are the barriers?

Is someone likely to build a Rust OS that is real and useful? Yes. Projects are already in progress, and even if they all shut down, I'm sure more will exist in the future.

Is that Rust OS going to experience "success" by traditional metrics, such as taking a significant chunk of Linux's marketshare away, and becoming a viable thing you can run on some real piece of hardware for some real purpose? I won't say "no" but it will be at least a decade before that will happen. Not because Rust is bad, or the resulting OS will be bad, but all the entrenched advantages existing OSes have are just staggeringly huge. If a perfect OS jewel of perfection appeared today, but with no other support for it (no software, drivers, applications that can only run on it, etc.) it would be a long, long time for it to get any traction.

>"Yes. Projects are already in progress, and even if they all shut down,"

Might you have any recommendations of specific ones worth paying attention to right now?

The most advanced one is Redox https://www.redox-os.org/

https://github.com/redox-os/tfs

I wonder how that effects the time horizon for maturity. I've always just assumed that a filesystem takes a good 10 years to be really stable. Maybe my assumptions are way off? Or the facts that its a reimplementation makes that matter much less? Didn't it take BTRFS around this length of be considered production stable?