And what about, for example, those government contractors who are in the same position as you: they have a large C++ codebase that currently works, and is too big to re-write in rust? Now they're being asked to make it safer. How will they do that with the "existing C++ process"?

Didn't Project Zero publish a blog post a few months ago, saying that old code isn't your security problem? They said it's new code you have to worry about. Zero also had copious amounts of data to demonstrate their point. In any case, if you really want to rewrite C++ in Rust, LLMs are fantastic at doing that. They're not really good yet at writing a new giant codebase from first principles. But if you give them something that already exists and ask them to translate it into a different language, oftentimes the result works for me on the first try. Even if it's hundreds of lines long.

The funny thing about government funding is that it may be easier to secure capital for a Rust rewrite than for ongoing maintenance to add static lifetimes and other safety features to an existing C++ codebase.

Legislatures seem a lot more able to allocate large pots of money for major discrete projects than to guarantee an ongoing stream of revenue to a continuing project.

They can use Fil-C++ and then they get memory safety without any rewrites.