Improving on C with Rust An analysis of Rusts preventative abilities

The C programming language is infamous for its ability to be exploited,thus it raises several security concerns. This thesis aims to investigate whether Rust can successfully prevent commonly known C programming errors and if it is a safe choice as a low-level programming language. This was done by selecting a total of 20 commonly known critical C programming errors and implementing them in both C and in Rust to observe the outcome and attempt to draw a conclusion from a safety point of view. The results show that 55% of programming errors were inexpressible by Rusts language design, 30% were detected by the compiler and 15% were flagged faults. The results for the sameprogramming errors in C showed that 85% went completely undetected by the C compiler, thus being unflagged faults, whereas 15% were flagged faults. Based on the results presented in this thesis one might conclude that Rusts language design yields better results than the C languagedesign. Thus, for the chosen programming errors Rust provides a safer alternative to C