You could. But now you are trusting an entirely new toolchain that can build the Rust-based linker, even if it is statically linked. This toolchain is much larger than a comparatively small and much more easily understood C bootstrap toolchain.

This effectively triples or quadruples (maybe even more) the amount of code you need to trust for the cold bootstrap.

Sorry to break it to everyone but Rust depends on python which depends on perl and openssl and the majority of any lean full source bootstrapped toolchain tree.

Unless the gcc rust engine is mature any time soon (lol), we have no path to use rust until very late game in a distro build.

The earliest we can bootstrap a go compiler is about 10 minutes. It builds directly from tinycc. Add 6 hours for our fastest compile of the shortest path to rust, with 192 cores.

I am a rust fan too, but it is the worst language to bootstrap, which is why for systems programming I still must often revert to C to have a small and reviewable and fast to build dependency surface.

Rust requires LLVM (or GCC) which requires C++, not just C.