[Cryptography] Ada vs Rust vs safer C

[Jerry Leichter]

>> Although the above is intended as satire, it's scarily close to way too many
>> bugzilla threads I've followed.
> 
> The salient difference being that in the software world it’s actually possible to just go build your own plane the way you like it.
This is widely repeated, but generally false.

The fraction of people using most OSS today who could, even in principle, fix a bug and rebuild the code is tiny.  And even then ... if the upstream team won't accept the fix, they've now put themselves on a branch, which they will own indefinitely.  A bad place to be, as they will be stuck with merging their change with newer version of the source.  Sometimes, this starts out easy; pretty much always, it eventually becomes impractical.

Branching an active open source project is something that should be taken up only with good reason and great caution.
                                                        -- Jerry