He literally did not. He literally explicitly said right there in the (in)famous "cancer" message that it didn't refer to Rust as a language.[1]
"And I also do not want another maintainer. If you want to make Linux impossible to maintain due to a cross-language codebase do that in your driver so that you have to do it instead of spreading this cancer to core subsystems. (where this cancer explicitly is a cross-language codebase and not rust itself, just to escape the flameware brigade)."
Stop spreading this kind of misinformation.
And no, I don't think he came off very well here, but please, give it a good faith reading.[2]
"And I also do not want another maintainer. If you want to make Linux impossible to maintain due to a cross-language codebase do that in your driver so that you have to do it instead of spreading this cancer to core subsystems. (where this cancer explicitly is a cross-language codebase and not rust itself, just to escape the flameware brigade)."
Stop spreading this kind of misinformation.
And no, I don't think he came off very well here, but please, give it a good faith reading.[2]
[1]: https://lwn.net/ml/all/[email protected]/
[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42977720