Not everything will be rewritten in Rust. I've broken down the arguments for why this is, and why it's a good thing, elsewhere [1].
Google's recent analysis on their own experiences transitioning toward memory safety provide even more evidence that you don't need to fully transition to get strong safety benefits. They incentivized moving new code to memory safe languages, and continued working to actively assure the existing memory unsafe code they had. In practice, they found that vulnerability density in a stable codebase decays exponentially as you continue to fix bugs. So you can reap the benefits of built-in memory safety for new code while driving down latent memory unsafety in existing code to great effect. [2]
Google's recent analysis on their own experiences transitioning toward memory safety provide even more evidence that you don't need to fully transition to get strong safety benefits. They incentivized moving new code to memory safe languages, and continued working to actively assure the existing memory unsafe code they had. In practice, they found that vulnerability density in a stable codebase decays exponentially as you continue to fix bugs. So you can reap the benefits of built-in memory safety for new code while driving down latent memory unsafety in existing code to great effect. [2]
[1]: https://www.alilleybrinker.com/blog/cpp-must-become-safer/
[2]: https://security.googleblog.com/2024/09/eliminating-memory-s...