> C might be inconvenient and lacking expressive power, but if people can't handle pointers and goto, what mess are they going to make with different address spaces and interrupts?

I have terrible news for you. People (well, humans, and I don't see anybody else signing up to maintain Linux) cannot in fact correctly handle pointers and goto. That's why they keep making mistakes.

It's actually to be hoped that Rust can usefully express constraints it has today to prevent some of those problems onto things like address spaces. It'd be great if say, driver code which can confuse a virtual address with a physical one just won't compile rather than compiling and then mysteriously not working as expected or causing occasionally BUG() reports.