In 2023, the NSA published a cybersecurity advisory recommending that organizations transition to "memory-safe" programming languages. They named Rust alongside Swift, Go, Java, and C# as examples. For a government security agency to weigh in on programming language choice was unprecedented — and it reflects a genuine shift in how the tech industry and policymakers are thinking about software security at the infrastructure level.
Why Memory Safety Is Now a National Security Issue
Approximately 70% of all serious security vulnerabilities in Microsoft products and the Chrome browser trace back to memory safety bugs: buffer overflows, use-after-free errors, null pointer dereferences. These bugs exist because C and C++ give programmers direct control over memory without enforcing correct usage. Rust eliminates this entire class of bugs at compile time through its ownership system — if your code compiles, it cannot have memory safety vulnerabilities. That guarantee is valuable enough that the Linux kernel, after 30 years of C-only policy, began accepting Rust in 2022.
Where Rust Is Already Running
- ›Linux kernel: first non-C language accepted for kernel development; Rust drivers in production since 6.1
- ›Android: all new Bluetooth and WiFi stack code written in Rust; 0 memory safety vulnerabilities in Rust code after two years
- ›Windows: Microsoft rewriting core Windows components in Rust as part of their Secure Future Initiative
- ›npm registry: Cloudflare rewrote their reverse proxy in Rust, achieving massive performance and reliability improvements
- ›AWS: Firecracker microVM (the foundation of AWS Lambda) is written entirely in Rust
The Learning Curve Is Real
Rust's ownership and borrowing system is genuinely difficult for developers coming from C, Python, or JavaScript. The compiler is famously strict — it rejects code that would compile fine in other languages. But the community consensus is that fighting the borrow checker is an investment: the bugs you never write because Rust wouldn't let you don't appear in production at 3am. The strictness front-loads the pain rather than deferring it to your users.
Rust doesn't make you a better programmer. It makes your programs impossible to write badly — which might actually be more valuable.
Written by Manas Garge
Founder & Data Engineer