Interestingly, what the adage left out, is the qualities. People don't just want a hole, without qualification. They want a hole that's reliably uniform (smooth bore, sharp edge), quick and easy to produce, and cost effective.

If Rust can avoid more errors with nearly the same performance profile (and control) offered by C, it's an improvement. The Hole purpose is to be a better low level language.

Is anyone writing a Python interpreter in Rust? Or an OpenSSL fork? Cert parsing libraries at least? I know there is a project to rewrite coreutils into Rust, seems that would also be a good demo. I don’t think the kernel drivers thing has landed yet, but it is also an interesting project.

There's a library for doing full X.509 certificate parsing and verification: https://briansmith.org/rustdoc/webpki/

There's definitely some attempts at doing pure-Rust SSL, but I suspect a lot of them are also doing some sketchy things with crypto that shouldn't be trusted (getting constant-time stuff implemented properly is really challenging, and probably requires large amounts of assembly to guarantee correctness).