I've contributed to unbound, and I wrote a lot of the DNS server that we use at Amazon. The main security risk in DNS is DDOS; it's by far the biggest concern a

I've contributed to unbound, and I wrote a lot of the DNS server that we use at Amazon. The main security risk in DNS is DDOS; it's by far the biggest concern and day to day pain, and a big part of a strategy for dealing with it having really high performance. 100s of thousands of QPS per core kind of performance. A lot of this boils down to using direct networking plumbing tricks and optimizing query handling into very fast flat memory lookups. A garbage collected language would be a terrible choice. C is still the most common solution, but if I were writing a DNS server today, I'd go with rust.