Rewriting the World in Rust

Rust is a systems programming language that, unlike C and C++, guarantees memory safety at compile time — meaning whole classes of bugs (buffer overflows, use-after-free, null pointer dereferences) are caught before the code even runs. This is a big deal for security: roughly 70% of critical vulnerabilities in major software like Windows, Linux, and Chrome have been memory-safety bugs. The U.S. government (via the White House Office of the National Cyber Director and agencies like CISA) has explicitly called for moving to memory-safe languages like Rust. Major tech companies are already doing this: Google uses Rust in Android and Chrome, Microsoft is rewriting Windows components in it, and the Linux kernel now accepts Rust code. The "rewrite it in Rust" (RIIR) movement is both a serious engineering trend and a running joke in the developer community — rewriting stable, battle-tested C/C++ software from scratch in Rust is enormously expensive and time-consuming, and many such projects stall or fail. Still, Rust's adoption is accelerating because the alternative (continuing to patch memory bugs in C/C++ codebases) is seen as unsustainable for critical infrastructure.