The author focuses on rewriting low-level media decoders in Rust. I have bit of experience in this area. I've been slowly working on an MPEG2 binary subtitle decoder in Rust:
https://github.com/emk/subtitles-rsA while back, I ran my subtitle decoder through "cargo fuzz", and I was pleasantly surprised at the results: Close to half a billion fuzz runs found 5 runtime panics, all of which were detected by Rust before they could compromise security. If I'd written this code in C, several of those errors would have been exploitable. I like to think I'm a lot more paranoid than the average programmer. But the MPEG2 format is gnarly and, sooner or later, I'll miss a potential overflow when bit shifting, or get confused following internal "pointers" in a subtitle packet.
Rust has a few advantages for this work:
1. Rust does not require a garbage collector or other specialized runtime. This makes it far easier to pretend to be boring C code. This is a significant advantage over some other excellent languages like Haskell, etc., which require non-trivial runtimes.
2. Rust is very fast by default. For low-level programming, this matters.
3. The Rust infrastructure for testing and fuzzing is surprisingly good and easy to use, which makes it easier to produce bullet-proof libraries.
The downside is that even if you're already familiar with C++, it's probably going to take a couple of weeks to become comfortable with Rust. And if you don't really understand stacks, heaps, memory layout and references, it may take even longer.
I do agree with the underlying thesis: In 15 years, I'll be heartbroken if we're still facing an endless stream of security updates and remote root compromises. But it's going to require literally billions of dollars of programmer time to put a dent in this problem.