alt Hacker NewsThe U.S. government could have required all new software for any government-procured system to be written memory-safe languages, thus making it ubiquitous. This could have been phased in slowly with a few years of on-ramp time to allow for industry to acquire the relevant skills.
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But even in memory-safe languages, compiler bugs are still an issue. The theory is perfect but the implementation is flawed. In such case once the compiler bugs are found, the software would have to be rewritten to compile. For example an 11 year old memory bug was discovered recently in the rust compiler: https://www.penligent.ai/hackinglabs/rust-borrow-checker-bug....
Memory safe languages are not a silver bullet either.
The U.S. government had pushed Ada for years and it never worked out. The government was forced to accept C++ because industry was rebelling against ADA, even though ADA was memory safe. Well, Ada did have the ability to be memory unsafe. It was much better by default.
The DoD have even created their own language: ADA. Massive contracts power, but different markets to incentivize.
The distance between the usual consumer/b2b tech startup and the kind of company that sells software to the air force is even bigger than the distance between Google and the kind of company who hires Accenture.
The DoD tried that with Ada and largely failed. That was with defense contractors whose primary customer mandated it. That was despite Ada being proven to work in its first projects.