Also... many posters suggest use of Rust may be a solution... It may turn out to be... but I think a more broader generalization of the language /compiler aspe

Also... many posters suggest use of Rust may be a solution... It may turn out to be... but I think a more broader generalization of the language /compiler aspect of things may be: Not so much to "use Rust", so much as "NOT to use C". That is -- any library performing decompression of any sort (regardless of whether that decompression is related to visual images or not), if it uses C and lookup tables and implements decompression -- should at least be considered a potential source of future problems, and should (ideally) be migrated to a more memory-safe, bounds-checked language -- in the future. Rust -- may or may not turn out to be this language... Negatives for Rust -- large size and complexity of Rust's compiler source code. Positives for Rust -- Rust's treatment of memory and bounds-checking. Anyway, some thoughts on the language/compiler aspect of this...