Rust does not solve the memory safety issue. It does mitigate it, and the post is about mitigation. That study finds that Rust "successfully limits memory-safety risks to the realm of unsafe code".
It also finds that Rust has novel patterns of unsafety in unsafe code. That's important! But it's fully compatible with the claim that Rust is much safer than C overall.
I don't think it ever says that the sum of safety in safe code and novel unsafety in unsafe code adds up to as much unsafety as C. The paper's overarching claims aren't quantitative.
I think you're overstating the claims of both the blog post and the study.
The recent track record of curl shows it has zero reported memory safety issues recently. Reading the article and the old linked research you'd be mislead.
It also states that Rust completely prevents them - it does not. The article talks about mitigation, but also says: "would have been completely prevented by using a memory-safe language". The "completely prevented" claim in the article is the one not supported by current research. If you only read this article, you'd be mislead about memory safety in Rust.
> The recent track record of curl shows it has zero reported memory safety issues recently.
Only if you look very recently. Earlier you said:
> You have to go back 9 months before you find one expired-pointer derefence issue resulting in potential data being sent to the wrong connection in rare circumstances and configurations. Which is a logic error that could happen in Rust too.
That bug is 6 months old and could not happen in safe Rust because references (pointers) cannot outlive their referents.
> It also states that Rust completely prevents them - it does not. The article talks about mitigation, but also says: "would have been completely prevented by using a memory-safe language".
It is literally true that they "would have been completely prevented by using a memory-safe language." The complication is that Rust is only memory-safe if you don't use unsafe.
rustls (the new curl component in question) uses no unsafe itself. I find some unsafe in its dependencies, but most of it seems to be for FFI, which is inherently unsafe. I'm also not sure that those should count—do OpenSSL vulnerabilities count as libcurl vulnerabilities?
> The "completely prevented" claim in the article is the one not supported by current research.
I will grant you that it's slightly misleading because it's possible to write unsafe Rust code. But that's not news, "current research" has nothing to do with it.
It also finds that Rust has novel patterns of unsafety in unsafe code. That's important! But it's fully compatible with the claim that Rust is much safer than C overall.
I don't think it ever says that the sum of safety in safe code and novel unsafety in unsafe code adds up to as much unsafety as C. The paper's overarching claims aren't quantitative.
I think you're overstating the claims of both the blog post and the study.