How memory safety CVEs differ between Rust and C/C++
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Memory safety CVE comparison between Rust and C/C++ directly addresses a key interest in software engineering trends.
A deep dive into how memory safety CVEs are reported and perceived differently between Rust and C/C++, using the curl library as a concrete example. The author demonstrates that calling curl_getenv(NULL) in C causes a segfault (a memory safety bug), yet no one would report it as a CVE because the caller is responsible for passing valid arguments. In Rust, the type system and borrow checker would make such an API misuse either a compile-time error or require explicit unsafe, shifting the burden of proof from the caller to the library author. This asymmetry explains why raw CVE counts between Rust and C/C++ are misleading: Rust's safety guarantees push vulnerability classes into the unsafe boundary, where they are more visible and harder to accidentally trigger.