The issue is more software architecture than programming languages. DJB writes plenty of C, and manages to create secure systems. If you follow the principle

The issue is more software architecture than programming languages. DJB writes plenty of C, and manages to create secure systems. If you follow the principle of least privilege and separate things into processes, then you can write secure systems in C. Granted, there is friction with this approach on modern Unix, but it's more than worth it, and much more likely to get done than rewriting all of OpenSSL or OpenSSH or nginx or Python in Rust or whatever. See "Some thoughts on security after 10 years of qmail 1.0": http://scholar.google.com/scholar?cluster=9814570315440570792&hl=en&as_sdt=0,5&sciodt=0,5 http://scholar.google.com/scholar?cluster=981457031544057079... People can and do write insecure code in any language. The most popular ones seem to be the most insecure -- C, PHP, and JavaScript -- and that doesn't seem to be coincidence (liberal languages have advantages as well as diadvantages). Systems have to be designed so that tiny mistakes aren't catastrophic, and rewriting everything in a different programming language is probably the most costly way of achieving that goal. In other words, it's an economic impossibility. See also: http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/research/security/capsicum/ http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/research/security/capsicum/ . This works with existing code.