I don't mean "isomorphic" in that every Rust feature has a corresponding C feature. I mean that you can replicate every runtime C feature in Rust, and vice versa. The advantage of Rust is that you get a lot more safety guarantees and ergonomic features out of the compiler than you would with C.

Are any of those safety guarantees important to a crypto project, though? Even heartbleed wasn't a "buffer overrun" in the memory safety sense of that word: the client was asking for and receiving the contents of memory that the server had every right, from a safety standpoint, to read from.

Absolutely. You're confusing Heartbleed and Tedbleed.

https://tonyarcieri.com/would-rust-have-prevented-heartbleed...

Oh, wow, thank you! I totally had conflated those two in my head. (Let this go down as a rare instance of a HN commenter not doubling down on being wrong...)