When I learned rust I thought it felt more C-like than C++ to be honest. Nowadays I’m pretty happy to be in this c to rust to c loop.
I think you’re exactly right about c++ not offering much benefit to someone like Linus. It’s much simpler than c++. Rust has also informed the way I write C (granted, I’ve also gained more experience along the way, but rust forced me to have more discipline for sure).
To clarify, I didn't mean suspicious in the sense of expecting malicious behavior, rather than in the sense of not being overly optimistic about this type of progress, because I think it is very hard to incorporate new tooling/languages despite their merits.
In other words: it would be nice to see this being fruitful, because it would possibly a strong, positive signal for programming and programming languages in general, but I'm cautious or "suspicious" still.
I mean, "it seems like our technology should fit this domain, let's see if we can help them use it" isn't so strange as conspiracies go.
It has an implication that Linux is something that any enthusiastic group of outsiders could force their changes into. And that there are rust people would create such a group of outsiders.
It has an implication that rust people and linux people are disjoint sets.
It's generally taking this strange adversarial view to a collaborative endeavour. People aren't "rustaceans" or not, it's not a sports team. People are people, they generally program in a wide variety of languages, and use whatever they think is best given a certain context.
I'm not sure if I've fully captured what seems "off" to me about the comment, but hopefully you get the gist.
As for asking questions, that's a clear example of https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Just_asking_questions - but at the same time the general sentiment seems to be frequently reflected in internet comments. I don't think it's a malicious case of this, just how they chose to express their opinions.