Programming Language Standards and their impact on Memory Safety: C++, Rust and Python : A comparative study

Sammanfattning

Memory safety vulnerabilities remain a prevalent security challenge, accounting for a significant majority of critical software defects. This paper investigates how programming language standards influence memory safety by analyzing three distinct approaches: the manual memory management of C++, the ownership-based compile-time model of Rust, and the automatic garbage collection of Python. These languages are evaluated by reproducing a suite of Common Weakness Enumeration (CWE) vulnerabilities, including buffer overflows, use-after-free, and null pointer dereference conditions to determine the stage at which faults are detected: compile-time, runtime, or silent execution.The study highlights the fundamental trade-offs in language design: Rust shifts detection to the compilation phase by imposing strict compile-time discipline on the developer. C++ prioritizes runtime performance and control, often relying on warnings rather than errors at the risk of silent failures, and Python ensures safety through significant runtime overhead. These findings quantify the cost of safety, offering a comparative view of the memory overhead and safety guarantees inherent to each language's design.