Comment by octoberfranklin

Why do you think the NSA could have put the industry on memory-safe languages?

Did you even read my comment? I very explicitly answered this.

Government purchasing requirements have an immense effect on industry. IME/PSP/TrustZone have 99% CPU coverage because NSA put "owner-inaccessible oversight processor with disjoint physical address space" into federal sourcing requirements.

They could easily have done the same with "memory-safe language". Note this is not the same as "must use Ada" which is obviously dumb. The IME/PSP/TrustZone req worked so well because they specified the feature not the implementation (and indeed it has been implemented three different ways).

But instead, NSA actively pushed in the opposite direction and funded all sorts of kludges to try to keep memory-unsafe languages kicking as long as possible.

They have actively sabotaged the national security of their own country.