But as bawolff said, the main issue is moving towards safer tech. If Ada had good enough momentum, we'd be discussing Ada in the kernel instead. C++ has been rejected from Linux, leaving Rust as the only kernel-capable language with enough momentum, so Rust it is.

That has nothing to do with memory safety though let alone Rust specifically. What we need is a smarter way to manage authentication (non-persistent session cookies and usage a password manager to handle the log in is a step in the right direction).

To some degree, it doesn't matter how Rust acquired the energy; if you want to hop the gap, gotta hitch a ride on the highest energy wave.

Also neither OCaml nor D make any attempts at stopping data races, which is sort of a selling point of Rust. Ada/SPARK, I suppose do, but I don't know at what cost; I'm sure though Rust syntax will feel more familiar to C developers than Ada, even if a lot of Rust syntax comes from ML. But it has {} :).