The lesson here is that people have an unrealistic view of how complex it is to write correct and safe multithreaded code on multi-core, multi-thread, assymmetric core, out-of-order processors. This is no shade to kernel developers. Rather, I direct this at people who seem to you can just create a thread pool in C++ and solve all your concurrency problems.
One criticism of Rust (and, no, I'm not saying "rewrite it in Rust", to be clear) is that the borrow checker can be hard to use whereas many C++ engineers (in particular, for some reason) seem to argue that it's easier to write in C++. I have two things to say about that:
1. It's not easier in C++. Nothing is. C++ simply allows you to make mistakes without telling you. GEtting things correct in C++ is just as difficult as any other language if not more so due to the language complexity; and
2. The Rust borrow checker isn't hard or difficult to use. What you're doing is hard and difficult to do correctly.
This is I favor cooperative multitasking and using battle-tested concurrency abstractions whenever possible. For example the cooperative async-await of Hack and the model of a single thread responding to a request then discarding everything in PHP/Hack is virtually ideal (IMHO) for serving Web traffic.
I remember reading about Google's work on various C++ tooling including valgrind and that they exposed concurrency bugs in their own code that had lain dormant for up to a decade. That's Google with thousands of engineers and some very talented engineers at that.
> The Rust borrow checker isn't hard or difficult to use. What you're doing is hard and difficult to do correctly.
There are entire classes of structures that no, aren't hard to do properly, but the borrow checker makes artificially hard due to design limitations that are known to be sub-optimal.
No, two-directional linked lists and partially editable data structures aren't inherently hard. It's a Rust limitation that a piece of code can't take enough ownership of them to edit they safely.