If you needed any more evidence that memory safety is the future...

[Moritz Maxeiner via Digitalmars-d]

On Sunday, 5 March 2017 at 11:48:23 UTC, Jacob Carlborg wrote:
> [...]
>
> I agree. The only potential hope I see would be to port Linux 
> to a memory safe language.

That would indeed eliminate essentially all of those tasks; 
unfortunately porting Linux in itself would require a tremendous 
amount of work. The only realistic way I could this of to do this 
would be to follow what was done e.g. in the dmd frontend and is 
currently being done with remacs[1]: Iteratively translate file 
by file, function by function. By the time you are done doing 
that with the Linux kernel, however - and I'm guessing 5 years is 
again a low estimate for the amount of work - your version 
will've become horribly out of sync with upstream, and then 
you'll continuously have to catch up with it. Unless of course 
you eventually decide that from point X on forward you don't sync 
with upstream anymore and lose future driver support (since the 
Linux kernel's API changes with every minor release).
I'm not saying it shouldn't be attempted, btw, but anyone trying 
needs to be fully aware of what he/she gets into and assemble a 
sizeable, reliable group of people dedicated to the task imho.

[1] https://github.com/Wilfred/remacs