For those not in the know, Xe posts a version of this story everytime something like this happens (large scale memory safety failure), just like The Onion re-posts their similar article after every mass shooting in the US.
C++ is the only language where this happens? Highly doubt. It's probably
because more applications are written in C++ than anything else, so it gets more visibility.
"There really isn't anything we can do to prevent memory safety vulnerabilities from happening if the programmer doesn't want to write their code in a robust manner" is funny because it's hard to do it right even if you care. The way you do things right consistently is make it easier to do it right than do it wrong.
There certainly are systematic solutions to at least _some_ of the real problems, based on formal methods, of which Rust's checkers are a simple example, and it's an inexcusable moral failure that they are not used more widely.
Reliable software is expensive to develop; more expensive than we are willing to admit. You can either take the expense at development time by increasing development cost, or you can shift it until later and externalise the cost by making the end-user and society at large suck it up in terms of unreliability and occasional disaster.
We are at the stage the Victorians were with exploding boilers, or people in early Medieval times were with collapsing cathedrals. They fixed their problems, and so can we.
