Realtime is important on fully fledged workstations where timing is very important. Which is the case for a lot of professional audio workloads. Linux is now another option for people in that space.
Not sure Linux can run on microcontrollers. Those tend to not be so powerful and run simple OSs if they have any OS at all. Though this might help the embedded world a bit increasing the number of things you can do with things that have full system on chips (like the Raspberry pi).
Give pipewire a go. It is basically replacing pulseaudio and jack as a combined thing and is meant to not have the latency issues that pulseaudio does.
The OP does have a fair point. Rust jobs are harder to find and generally require niche knowledge in some area more then rust knowledge.
What? You can easily escape from it if there are better alternatives you can use. Pointing at one language and saying it is not easy to code like it is another language is a pointless argument. You can do that about any two languages. They all differ for good reasons and as long as you can solve similar problems in both, even if in different ways then what does it matter that you cannot do it in the same way?
You could do a lot of things. Rust had a gc and it was removed so they have already explored this area and are very unlikely to do so again unless there is a big need for it that libraries cannot solve. Which I have not seen anyone that actually uses the language a lot see the need for.
Not like how async was talked about - that required a lot if discussion and tests in libraries before it was added to the language. GC does not have anywhere near as many people pushing for it, the only noise I see is people on the outside thinking it would be nice with no details on how it might work in the language.
So someone that is not involved in rust at all and does not seem to like the language thinks it will get a GC at some point? That is not a very credible source for such a statement. Rust is very unlikely to see an official GC anytime soon if ever. There are zero signs it will ever get one. There was a lot of serious talk about it before 1.0 days - but never made it into the language. Similar to green threads which was a feature of the language pre 1.0 days but dropped before the 1.0 release. Rust really wants to have a no required runtime and leans heavy on the zero-cost abstractions for things. Which a GC would impose on the language.
There are quite a few places where a GC is just not acceptable. Anything that requires precise timing for one. This includes kernel development, a lot of embedded systems, gaming, high frequency trading and even latency critical web servers. Though you are right that a lot of places a GC is fine to have. But IMO rust adds more than just fast and safe code without a GC - lots of people come to the language for those but stay for the rest of the features it has to offer.
IMO a big one is the enum support it has and how they can hold values. This opens up a lot of patterns that are just nice to use and one of the biggest things I miss when using other languages. Built with that are Options and Results which are amazing for representing missing values and errors (which is nicer than coding with exceptions IMO). And generally they whole type system leads you towards thinking about the state things can be in and accounting for those states which tends to make it easier to write software with fewer issues in production.
but imagine if you have to perform this operation for an unknown amount of runtime values
This is a poor argument. You dont write code like this in rust. If you can find a situation where it is an actual issue we can discuss things but to just say imagine this is a problem when it very likely is not a problem that can be solved in a better way at all let alone a common one is a very poor argument.
Typically when you want an escape from lifetimes that means you want shared ownership of data which you can do with an Arc. Cow and LazyLock can also help in situations - but to dismiss all these for some imagined problem is a waste of time. Comes up with a concrete example where it would help. Very likely you would find another way to solve the problem in any realistic situation you can come up with that I would suspect leads to a better overall design for a rust program.
I would say this is just a straw man argument - but you have not even created a straw man to begin with, just assume that one exists.
Cannot deal with days that are too wet either, roads flood and cars get stuck trying to push through them.