Memory Safe Programming Languages are on the Rise

upstart writes:

Memory safe programming languages are on the rise. Here's how developers should respond:

Developers across government and industry should commit to using memory safe languages for new products and tools, and identify the most critical libraries and packages to shift to memory safe languages, according to a study from Consumer Reports.

The US nonprofit, which is known for testing consumer products, asked what steps can be taken to help usher in "memory safe" languages, like Rust, over options such as C and C++. Consumer Reports said it wanted to address "industry-wide threats that cannot be solved through user behavior or even consumer choice" and it identified "memory unsafety" as one such issue.

The report, Future of Memory Safety, looks at range of issues, including challenges in building memory safe language adoption within universities, levels of distrust for memory safe languages, introducing memory safe languages to code bases written in other languages, and also incentives and public accountability.

During the past two years, more and more projects have started gradually adopting Rust for codebases written in C and C++ to make code more memory safe. Among them are initiatives from Meta, Google's Android Open Source Project, the C++-dominated Chromium project (sort of), and the Linux kernel.

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