this post was submitted on 21 Dec 2023
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People keep saying this but Rust is not only about memory safety. It's not C with memory safety sprinkled on top. Compare with C and C++ it has better tooling and dependency management, it's easier to create modules and organize your code, it's easier to write tests and it has loads of nice, modern language features like algebraic types and typeclasses. Because of all this Rust is growing fast and a lot of people like it. Writing things in Rust is a bet that more people will get behind them and you will be able to add more features faster to them than to existing projects in C. The idea is not to simply do the same but in Rust. It is to have a cleaner, easier to approach codebase that will allow to grow faster in the future.
I'm looking at how many of the bugs and security issues are due to memory unsafe code - it's A LOT and new ones come up almost daily. Humans are just bad at writing safe code because we are so fallible. So if we can eliminate a significant percentage of these bugs from the ground up that suddenly becomes very interesting. Besides personally after two decades of C and C++ (and debugging them) I find Rust much more pleasant and "ergonomic" to use.
If we want an OS to be more secure by design we really have to begin at the most basic level. It might never be perfect but we can greatly reduce the attack surface. This is also why Microsoft is rewriting a number of vulnerable system components of Windows in Rust.
So why is it important to the end-user? Well, if that's Average Joe, maybe not but Redox OS right now is not mainstream, it is for us nerds who are interested in a safer OS and to see what can be done in that space. Maybe you don't care and that's fine, but some of us do and just like any post here, people can chose to skip over it or dive into the discussion, we can't guarantee that all posts or projects are interesting to everyone :)