Very naive question. What's the main selling point of Rust besides being stably sponsored by Mozilla?
1) Memory safety. If you live in the world of kernels and embedded code, your options are mostly C, C++, and (as of just the last few years) Rust. Of those, only Rust reliably prevents memory corruption mistakes like use-after-free.
2) Being a 21st century language. Rust has a lot of features that any new language would be expected to have these days: a unified build system, a library ecosystem that the build sytem knows about, slices over arrays and vectors, UTF-8 strings, convenient ways to de/serialize JSON, something like async/await, etc. This makes it competitive with languages like Java and Python for doing "everyday stuff", where realistically ~no one would use C. The main downside of Rust in a Java/Python sort of context is that the learning curve is a lot steeper.
A couple other notes:
- Some of nice 21st century features (like JSON) go away when you're writing embedded/kernel code, but others still work. Embedded ("no_std") Rust still has enums, error handling, slices, iterators, and sometimes even async/await. Those quality-of-life features are hard to replicate in C, even if you believe your code is 100% bug free :)
- If you know you're going to be writing multithreaded code, Rust's thread safety features are really unmatched. A lot of the same machinery that gets used for memory safety also turns out to be useful for thread safety. Libraries like Rayon make it surprisingly convenient to write multithreaded code, while also catching a huge percentage of mistakes at compile time. (Deadlocks are still possible though.)