You can definitely rig up the erasure to happen in a destructor (C++) or Drop implementation (Rust). Convincing the compiler not to optimize it out is tricky, b

You can definitely rig up the erasure to happen in a destructor (C++) or Drop implementation (Rust). Convincing the compiler not to optimize it out is tricky, but many cryptographic libraries include that functionality. The c11 standard has a memset_s function with the right semantics, but there are other ways to implement it. Re: constant time operations, I don't know of any language or system that does this currently. But a while back I was kicking around the idea with a friend and we came to a design that I'm pretty sure would work. Never got around to implementation though; so many projects, so little time.