> This statement is nonsensical.
You're right, my bad. It is hard to be precise in a comment where I'm trying to be as concise as possible.
I'm sure you know what I mean though, with regards to temporal memory safety (lifetimes), data races (Send/Sync traits), etc. Rust works by preventing many classes of bugs through compile errors, rather than panics.
> If a kernel panics, that is either a bug or hardware failure.
And this is where Rust differs; Rust will reduce the likelihood of bugs from happening in the first place. I'm not saying Zig doesn't also do that, Rust just does it more.
The Rust compiler devs, in their quest to make a type system that is powerful enough to catch most memory corruption errors, somehow came up with something that can be used to catch far more issues than just that.
The affine(ish) type system, coupled with lifetimes, makes modeling and maintaining correct states much easier than in Zig, for all sorts of objects and abstractions.
From what I've read from Linus on LKML/lore along the years, a kernel oops/panic is seen as one of the worst things that could happen to it; there is generally nothing the user can do at that point to debug it (they likely won't even see the console), and makes the machine unusable for all other tasks. Sometimes you might be lucky and just kill and collect the thread that panicked, but oftentimes you get the nuclear OOPS option. With Zig you don't even get the option to catch it via something like catch_unwind.