From my memory of Linus's C++ comments, they basically boil down to "the kernel needs to do everything in freestanding mode, and everything that's interesting in C++ is not in freestanding mode, so what good is it?" (plus some ranting about "zero-cost" exception handling being rather more expensive than its name implies). In general, a strong vibe of someone who tried C++ in the early 90s, gave up on it then, and is generally ignorant of how C++ is different from back then.

If Linus's first introduction to C++ was to C++11, I'd imagine his opinion of C++ would be higher (probably not high enough to permit it into the kernel, though). To a large degree, Rust is "take the good new parts of C++11, strip out some of the legacy insanity, and let's also work out how to keep as much of the good stuff in a freestanding environment as possible." Which answers a lot of the objections that Linus had to C++!

That's also in line with my memory of it.

We still don't have all of the interesting C++ features in freestanding mode. It's still a fairly unknown component of libc++ and libstdc++. I've only been playing with it recently because I was curious about how many of the c++17 and newer compile time features I could get to work in avr-g++.

And the answer is ... not much.

I've been spoiled by Rust's "core" crate.

There was also the epic quote about how keeping out all the C++ programmers was enough of a reason.

Which is funny, because you can see the truth to it. With C++ comes endless debates. No technical reason really, but a social one, and so far the Rust culture seems to be closer to C in that regard.

As someone that started with C++ on MS-DOS, back when 640 KB would be enough for everyone, there is plenty of stuff in C++, making it better than C even in kernel space.

That is why contrary to Linus opinion, Symbian, IBM z and IBM i, Windows (since Vista), GenodeOS, and OS X, have C++ running on their kernels even if it isn't the full blown language.

Additionally many of his criticism against C++, applies equally well to Rust, in terms of language complexity, just wait until some kernel driver go crazy with macros or FP inspired designs.

What is indeed a plus for Rust is the secure code mentality that both C and C++ communities have kept downplaying until companies and government had enough with burning money fixing exploits.