Rust Was Created Because 70% of All Security Bugs Come from One Type of Error — and C Can't Fix It

Key Takeaways

• •70% of security vulnerabilities in C/C++ code are memory safety bugs
• •Rust eliminates these bugs at compile time with the borrow checker
• •Most loved language on Stack Overflow for 7 consecutive years (2016-2022)
• •Now in the Linux kernel, Android, Windows, and AWS core infrastructure

Source: Vendor security reports 2019-2024

Timeline

In 2019, Microsoft's security team published a startling finding: roughly 70% of all security vulnerabilities in Microsoft products were memory safety bugs. Buffer overflows. Use-after-free errors. Null pointer dereferences. The same categories of bugs, over and over, for decades.

Google reported the same number for Chrome. Apple reported similar figures for iOS. The Linux kernel team found that memory safety issues were their single largest category of security bugs.

The common thread: all of this critical software was written in C or C++. And C's approach to memory management — 'here's a pointer, good luck' — had been causing security catastrophes since the Morris Worm exploited a buffer overflow in 1988.

Graydon Hoare started Rust after his apartment building's elevator crashed due to a software bug. He thought: there must be a better way to write systems code.

Graydon Hoare was a Mozilla engineer who had been thinking about this problem. The legend says he started Rust in 2006 after his apartment building's elevator repeatedly crashed due to software bugs. He thought there must be a way to write systems code — the fast, low-level code that controls hardware — without the constant risk of memory corruption.

Hoare's key insight was that most memory bugs follow a pattern: they happen when two parts of a program access the same memory in conflicting ways. One part frees memory that another part is still using. One part writes to memory that another part is reading. One part holds a reference to memory that has been moved.

Rust's solution is the borrow checker — a compiler feature that tracks ownership of every piece of memory in your program. The rules are simple: every value has exactly one owner. You can borrow a reference to a value, but you can't have a mutable reference and an immutable reference to the same value at the same time. When the owner goes out of scope, the memory is automatically freed.

Rust doesn't have a garbage collector. It doesn't need one. The borrow checker proves at compile time that your memory usage is safe. If it compiles, it won't segfault.

If your code violates these rules, it won't compile. Not 'it might crash at runtime.' Not 'we'll catch it with a test.' It literally will not compile. The borrow checker mathematically proves that your memory usage is safe before a single line of code runs.

This was Rust's revolutionary proposition: zero-cost memory safety. No garbage collector (like Java or Go), no runtime overhead, no performance penalty. Just compile-time guarantees that your code cannot have the memory bugs that cause 70% of security vulnerabilities.

Mozilla officially sponsored Rust development in 2010. Rust 1.0 was released in May 2015. Developers immediately fell in love. Rust was voted the 'most loved programming language' on Stack Overflow's annual survey for seven consecutive years (2016-2022).

The adoption curve has been remarkable. In 2021, the Linux kernel — historically a pure C project — accepted Rust as an official language for new code. Google adopted Rust for Android's Bluetooth stack and saw memory safety bugs drop to zero in the rewritten components. AWS built critical infrastructure in Rust. Microsoft is rewriting core Windows components in Rust. Cloudflare rewrote its network proxy in Rust.

Rust isn't just replacing C in new projects — it's being used to gradually replace C in existing critical infrastructure. Every line of C code that gets rewritten in Rust is a line that can never produce a buffer overflow.

The root of Rust is a simple observation: the most dangerous bugs in computing have been the same bugs for 50 years. Instead of asking programmers to be more careful, Rust made the bugs impossible.

It turns out the best way to prevent memory safety bugs is to make a compiler that refuses to produce them.

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