> But the problem with your take is the subtle implication that Rust is "safe" (not just memory-safe) when in fact there is no empirical evidence or track record of Rust being successfully used in anything remotely mission-critical.
An application built from the ground up in a language like Rust is going to have fewer vulnerabilities than the same application built in C++. I say this as a person who loves C++ and is intimately familiar with the state of the art of securing C++ applications. I am not proposing an immediate rewrite of everything, though I do personally believe that the "well a rewrite will just introduce more vulns" concern is overblown. I expect papers in ICSE in the not to distant future to be able to validate one of our views.
Rust is not flawless, not even close. There are other alternatives and there can even be new languages in the future, but it has the most mindshare and it is an alternative today. For many years, people would simply say that there was nothing that could compete with C and C++ for systems programming. Rust very nearly handles all of the common use cases. But... I didn't even really mention Rust in my post so I think it is especially difficult to call me an evangelist for it.
Like it or not, ideas in research languages take ages to filter into real world ecosystems. My PhD is in the intersection of static analysis and security. I love this research. But the honest truth is that waiting for MSR to produce the path forward is not a winning strategy. Languages need ecosystems and I think it is more likely that the future will come from industry than directly from academia.
An application built from the ground up in a language like Rust is going to have fewer vulnerabilities than the same application built in C++. I say this as a person who loves C++ and is intimately familiar with the state of the art of securing C++ applications. I am not proposing an immediate rewrite of everything, though I do personally believe that the "well a rewrite will just introduce more vulns" concern is overblown. I expect papers in ICSE in the not to distant future to be able to validate one of our views.
Rust is not flawless, not even close. There are other alternatives and there can even be new languages in the future, but it has the most mindshare and it is an alternative today. For many years, people would simply say that there was nothing that could compete with C and C++ for systems programming. Rust very nearly handles all of the common use cases. But... I didn't even really mention Rust in my post so I think it is especially difficult to call me an evangelist for it.
Like it or not, ideas in research languages take ages to filter into real world ecosystems. My PhD is in the intersection of static analysis and security. I love this research. But the honest truth is that waiting for MSR to produce the path forward is not a winning strategy. Languages need ecosystems and I think it is more likely that the future will come from industry than directly from academia.