Do you have a specific language in mind that offers improvement? Or am I reading too much into the sentence?
>We already have the tools at our disposal to do magnitude greater secure software
Mind sharing more details on the tools? Specifically with respect to System / OS Level programming.
syskaller is in use by the major BSDs and stricter compilers and other static analysis tools have been a far bigger impact IMHO than the OpenBSD style mitigations. I would like to actually see some kind of case studies where OpenBSD mitigations have protected a user where they'd have been let down by say Linux or FreeBSD or OpenBSD without them.
I think a less snake oil approach to security is done by the seL4 folks, the difference in approach makes the *nix security mitigation people somewhat cringe worthy.
Any language with memory and type safety should comprise as much as possible of the whole system. See the Singularity OS from Microsoft Research, or whatever that Rust OS project is called.
Almost all the major, nicknamed, headline-grabbing RCE bugs in the last two decades are memory or type safety issues in C or C++ code.
Every C or C++ developer claims safe code is possible or even easy in their favorite language, but history has proven them very wrong.
I've been quite negative in this thread because the overall debate on these topics is pretty frivolous. We already have the tools at our disposal to do magnitude greater secure software and splitting hairs over which BSD has better defaults is missing the forest for the trees.