![]() "C++, at its core, is not a safe language," Levick said in his talk.īy design, Rust prevents developers from making those mistakes. Those mistakes allow malicious attackers to flood memory registers with data, creating a "buffer overflow" security problem that can overwrite data in memory registers adjacent to one program, and allow attackers to run code without the user's knowledge or consent. And according to Levick, over the last 15 years or so, around 70% of the security vulnerabilities in Microsoft products that required a CVE disclosure were memory-related. ![]() It is very, very easy for programmers using C++ to make memory-handling mistakes. C++ is a powerful and efficient language that introduced the object-oriented programming concepts, now present in so many languages, to the seminal C language. Over the last few decades, a huge percentage of the low-level systems software that controls the world's computers has been written in a language called C++, which was first released in 1985 and became a big part of Microsoft's product strategy. Rust may have its own issues - it's particularly difficult to learn, for instance - but it's "the industry's best chance for addressing this issue head-on," said Ryan Levick, principal cloud developer advocate at Microsoft, in a recent talk. Those companies are all hoping to avoid the security mistakes of the past. And at Mozilla, where Rust was originally developed, the language was used to build the core browsing engine at the heart of Firefox. Dropbox rewrote some of its core systems software in Rust as part of the process of rolling out its own hardware infrastructure. AWS used Rust to build Firecracker, an open-source serverless computing platform that runs the company's strategically important Lambda and Fargate services. That's why the language is increasingly gaining momentum, as a new generation of companies start to rewrite their critical infrastructure for the cloud computing era. Rust was designed to prevent developers from making memory-handling mistakes that can lead to damaging (and prevalent) security flaws, and it also helps those developers figure out why their software isn't working. ![]() But they're also excited about an emerging programming language that promises something better.įor the fourth consecutive year, Rust topped Stack Overflow's 2020 survey of the "most loved" programming languages in software development, and there are some easy-to-understand reasons why. The world's best software developers have a not-so-well-kept secret: Most of the crucial back-end systems that power the world rest on a precarious foundation of software held together with the digital equivalent of popsicle sticks and chewing gum.
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