The Open Source Security Foundation and the Linux Foundation's action plan to improve open source software’s security and resilience includes eliminating programming languages like C and C++ because they create challenges for memory safety. But languages like Rust, according to the action plan, offer more secure yet high performance alternatives.

"While they are obviously pioneering languages in their own right, and influential in Rust as a programming language, C and C++ were not designed as memory safe languages," Rebecca Rumbul, Rust Foundation's executive director, wrote in an email to SDxCentral.

Rust, however, was designed from its beginning to be both memory-safe and high performance. This means the language does not allow users to access memory they aren't permitted to access.

"Rust takes the approach of ensuring you have a memory-safe program at compile-time, before your program is run or library is deployed. Security in Rust is essentially baked-in," Rumbul explained.

The switch from legacy C or C++ code to Rust should be a natural migration, she added, because of the influence those languages had on Rust's development.

And the language offers a balance between high-performance code and security that its growing user base needs. According to a recent Slashdata report, Rust has tripled in usage to 2.2 million developers over the past two years.

If an open source programming language is going to succeed, it of course requires a good value proposition for its use, but beyond that it needs dedicated maintainers, users, and volunteers to build, test, debug, and promote the language. "Rust is lucky to have that community, and is a big reason why Rust has been named the most loved language" in recent years, Rumbul said.

And while she noted the Rust language itself could be crucial for solving some of the challenges of open source security, "progress needs the engagement of stakeholders from across the spectrum." It "will require a broad collaborative effort, with input from individual developers all the way to the biggest companies," she explained.

"Security is always a high priority item," Rumbul added. "The Foundation provides support to ensure that the infrastructure used to develop Rust is not just user-friendly and efficient, but also secure."