[OneLessThing]

Yes, this has been a trend for a little while now. For example this gist[1] gives linux boot parameters to make linux significantly faster and all it does is basically turn off all default security mitigations. I would make the distinction between vulnerabilities and "exploitable" vulnerabilities though. Mitigations usually give a runtime performance hit but don't remove the underlying flaws, it can just make it harder, or sometimes impossible, to escalate a little flaw into full blown code execution. But also know that offensive techniques advance along side defensive ones. For example ASLR was once considered the death of vulnerability research, but new methods and ideas were found and bypassing ASLR is now just part of the job. Each mitigation must be regularly evaluated against the state of the art, and against the cost to performance (and complexity, etc.). You ideally don't want to be paying performance costs when they aren't helping security.

Rust, Zig, and others, are additionally paying compile time performance costs to remove some underlying vulnerabilities. Which is interesting and probably a good thing for software.

[1] https://gist.github.com/jfeilbach/f06bb8408626383a083f68276f...

[theragra]

thanks