The speaker doesn't understand the audience question and doesn't respond to it.
The audience member points out that they shouldn't encode the semantics into the Rust type system because that would mean that refactoring the C code breaks Rust, which is not an acceptable situation. The speaker responds to this by saying essentially "tell me what the semantics are and I'll encode them in the Rust type system." That's maximally missing the point.
The proposal would cause large classes of changes to C to break the build, which would dramatically slow down kernel development, even if a small handful of Rust volunteers agree to eventually come in and fix the build.
> You can literally shove facts in someone's face, and they won't admit to being wrong or misunderstand, and instead continue to argue against some points whose premise isn't even true.
I have to say that I used to be excited about Rust, but the Rust community seems very toxic to me. I see a lot of anger, aggression, vindictiveness, public drama, etc. On HN you not infrequently see down voting to indicate disagreement. These clashes with the Linux maintainers look really bad for Rust to me. So bad that I'm pretty convinced Rust as a language is over if they're no longer banging on the technical merits and are instead banging on the table.
I'm sure there are great things about the community. But I would encourage the community to have higher standards of behavior if they want to be taken seriously. The Linux team seem like they're trying to look beyond the childishness because they are optimistic about the technical merits, but they must be so tired of the drama.