As a "userspace" Rust developer, I'm happy that this still appears to be close enough to the standard Rust dialect that I could still be productive. I suspect that allocations are intentionally a little more explicit.
It would be cool if there was a few easy-for-beginner tasks to pick up and try my hand at this sort of work.
Yeah, Rust tends to have enough type-safety that you can encode project-specific constraints to it and lower the learning curve to that of Rust itself, rather than learning all the idiosyncratic unconscious and undocumented design constraints that you need to abide by to keep from destabilizing things.
A big eventual non-technical goal of the Rust for Linux project is to reduce the barrier to entry for kernel programming, Rust is a good language for averting gumption traps IMO †
It would be cool if there was a few easy-for-beginner tasks to pick up and try my hand at this sort of work.