I'm starting to get sick of the neverending sentiment that Rust is the only option to write secure software, and any remark for security gets dismissed as Rust sales pitch.
Plenty of languages to chose from to replace C and its kind.
Of course there are. Swift might be a viable alternative. There are also up-and-coming languages like Zig. But, like it or not, Rust has the best combination of features, mindshare, and community to make it a viable path for businesses today or in the very near future.
Sure, Ada/SPARK is another option. Listing out the various potential choices people can make is not especially interesting to me. I don't personally care about Rust. I care about people taking action to solve a frankly embarrassing problem in our industry.
That would, depending on implementation, either have limited impact (if it only applied in the context of a commercial relationship), or destroy FOSS (if it didn't).
The usual argument, health inspections don't destroy the little business selling sandwiches on the corner, or street regulations and those doing their own home made car.
Plenty of languages far better suited for most use cases, yes we have that. But to replace C, there are not that much candidates. I don’t mean Rust is such a candidate.
Maybe Zig is currently the closest thing to such a candidate, but it doesn’t even pretend to aim at this, andalign with the "C ABI as interoperation modus for foreign function interface" policy, like the rest[1] of programming languages.
From 1958 up to the mid-1980's many OSes were written in something else other than C, and in the 15 years that preceded it there were approaches beyond pure Assembly.
Granted it is a matter for the market to be willing to move beyond it, and the OSes written in it, but the matter isn't technical per se, rather economical, political, human behaviours,...
Yes, we totally agree that this is not a purely technical issue. This is not completely unrelated, inertia here is also fed by technical considerations.
Plenty of languages to chose from to replace C and its kind.