One of the key things that makes unbound amazing is how tiny and fast it is - this enables use-cases like running it on every node of a giant deployment to prov

One of the key things that makes unbound amazing is how tiny and fast it is - this enables use-cases like running it on every node of a giant deployment to provide better dns failover and other things, without wasting too many fleet resources on dns-on-every-node overhead. It's not impossible to do the same in safer languages, but there aren't a lot of great options. Java - which others have suggested - definitely wouldn't work - no way you could make it anywhere near as tiny. Go is a bit better but you're still paying costs over C that add up if you're running hundreds of thousands of instances. Rust simply didn't exist when this was written. D? maaaybe, but then you just annihilated your pool of contributors. I'm not sure what the best choice would be, honestly.