What really bothers me about HN and the startup echo chamber at large is the idea that newness makes something inherently better.
It's like an endemic of "not invented here" fever.
A language is not inherently better simply because it is newer. Sometimes the old ways are best. Rust will not magically solve problems like this. Only more disciplined coding and auditing practices can.
You are greatly misrepresenting the comment you're replying to. It is not suggesting that Rust is better because it's newer. It's suggesting that Rust would avoid this vulnerability because Rust is designed to avoid this vulnerability. It is absolutely possible to "magically solve problems like this" at a language level. Buffer overruns are possible because of specific decisions in the design of C. They simply do not exist in, for example, Java programs. There will still be errors that can occur, but this particular bug is 100% an artifact of C.
> Rust will not magically solve problems like this.
I agree that it won't magically solve problems like this, but it _will_ solve problems like this. Rust guarantees protection from data races, buffer overflow, stack overflow or access to uninitialized or deallocated memory. At compile time.
That's because C++ is an approximate superset of C, an so it inherits all of that baggage as well. This is why we need new systems programming languages like Rust, designed for the 21st century with the benefit of hindsight.
It's like an endemic of "not invented here" fever.
A language is not inherently better simply because it is newer. Sometimes the old ways are best. Rust will not magically solve problems like this. Only more disciplined coding and auditing practices can.