seems like the since Kernighan didn't say anything good about Rust, folks here are quick to declare that he didn't say anything, and that Kernighan's opinion on a programming language he tried and didn't like is "uninformed" LOL

here is what he said, which i got from the writeup at this newstack.io article, which I had found via the discussion at Slashdot https://developers.slashdot.org/story/25/08/30/044226/what-h...

Rust Replacing C?

It was a moment for the ages. “Do you think there’s any sort of merit to Rust replacing C?” one audience member asked, a frequent topic on TNS.

“Or is this just a huge hype bubble that’s waiting to die down?”

In a world that’s been earnestly transitioning for years to more memory-safe languages, the answer from a long-time booster of C — for over half a century — promised to be nothing short of iconic.

“Ohhh, Rust,” Kernigham said, to audience laughter.

‘”I have written only one Rust program, so you should take all of this with a giant grain of salt,” he said. “And I found it a — pain… I just couldn’t grok the mechanisms that were required to do memory safety, in a program where memory wasn’t even an issue!”

Yet his biggest complaint about Rust seemed to be its performance — an especially damning complaint from a man whose early career started on a 16-bit PDP 11/20.

Digital_PDP11-20 front panel - IMG_1498_cropped - Creative Commons via Wikipedia - author Rama and Musee Bolo

Speaking of Rust, Kernighan said “The support mechanism that went with it — this notion of crates and barrels and things like that — was just incomprehensibly big and slow.”

“And the compiler was slow, the code that came out was slow…”

All in all, Kernighan had had a bad experience. “When I tried to figure out what was going on, the language had changed since the last time somebody had posted a description! And so it took days to write a program which in other languages would take maybe five minutes…”

It was his one and only experience with the language, so Kernighan acknowledged that when it comes to Rust “I’m probably unduly cynical.

“But I’m — I don’t think it’s gonna replace C right away, anyway.”