Can software be completely bug-free? No – and it’s a major problem, especially in sectors like automotive, aviation and medical technology. In these sectors, a huge amount of effort goes into fixing security vulnerabilities and protecting data. Rust is a still relatively new programming language which takes an interesting approach to this problem. In Rust, the most damaging security vulnerabilities are prevented at source. As well as reducing risk, this also reduces operating costs – and could revolutionise software development.
Even today, for low-level or high-performance applications, C and C++ are pretty much de rigueur. Their flexibility and efficiency mean that, despite being 50 and nearly 40 years old respectively, in many areas they remain indispensable. Until now, they have always succeeded in adapting to new technologies and requirements.
This dominance, however, is starting to wane.
The reason for this is that in recent years there has been a growing emphasis on security. C and C++ applications are regularly found to contain very expensive and potentially very damaging bugs as a result of failure to correctly handle application memory (memory safety errors).