The entire compute world was built on top of C and C++. Saying they're not fit for purpose doesn't seem correct. I think what you're really saying is they're not an optimal choice from a safety perspective.

> All of these need to be ported to Rust or another memory-safe language ASAP to prevent mayhem.

Seems like hyperbole... It might be ideal if we could snap our fingers and suddenly have rust ports, but I feel like you're discounting the effort that goes into doing that properly.

Which brings me to an interesting point. We have a web engine written in Rust. It's Servo. If the Rust port is so important to do as soon as possible to avoid mayhem, why aren't companies picking up Servo and using that?

I assure you that Microsoft knew for years that there were thousands if not tens of thousands of memory related bugs lurking in Windows. But their policy was "don't fix" (and "don't look") unless a remotely exploitable vulnerability was making headlines. Because every minute a developer spends finding and fixing bugs is a minute he can't spend on adding new features customers will pay for.

Luckily one of the perks of A.I. is that it makes large scale code migrations feasible in a timely manner.

> Saying they're not fit for purpose doesn't seem correct.

I'll quite happily say they were never fit for purpose. C had a role in bootstrapping early software development in the absence of anything better but once Lisp, Delphi, Smalltalk and Java arrived on the scene then it, and its equally footgunnable variants, should have been pushed to the margins where hardware constraint was the primary consideration.

Writing a browser in C++ in the 21st century was ridiculous and irresponsible.

Well we make work with the tools we have

It worked well enough, maybe "fit for purpose" is a stronger word