Thou shalt have no other gods before the ANSI C standard 1608

Trevor L. Jackson, III extremely high. Would you write any of these in a memory-safe language?

These are not the common case. Generally, operating system components tend not to be good candidates for memory-safe languages, at the moment. Applications, on the other hand, tend to be good candidates for memory-safe languages. Fortunately, most of the code -- and most of the security holes -- resides in applications, not in the OS.

I don't claim that *everything* in the world should be written in a memory-safe language; just that memory-safety is under-appreciated and under-utilized.

But even if we look at your list, I see a few that might be plausible candidates for implementation in a memory-safe language. File systems and many device drivers seem like good candidates to be written in memory-safe languages; my guess is that their performance is usually I-O-bound, not CPU-bound. I'd be delighted to have my firewall written in a memory-safe language: security is more important than performance, and you usually don't need all that much performance from a firewall anyway. My preference would be to have my network stack and network drivers written in a memory-safe language, because I rarely need very high performance from my network, but I can see how others (e.g., streaming video) would be unhappy.