Microsoft: 70 percent of all security bugs are memory safety issues: https://www.zdnet.com/article/microsoft-70-percent-of-all-se...
Rust's Memory Safety Model: An Evaluation of Its Effectiveness in Preventing Common Vulnerabilities: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S187705092...
"...can Rust achieve the memory-safety promise? This paper studies the question by surveying 186 real-world bug reports collected from several origins which contain all existing Rust CVEs (common vulnerability and exposures) of memory-safety issues by 2020-12-31. We manually analyze each bug and extract their culprit patterns. Our analysis result shows that Rust can keep its promise that all memory-safety bugs require unsafe code..."
You can't change the environment codecs are expected to run in, or the data they are used to process, but you can use effective tools to limit the sorts of bugs you are likely to run into, and isolate them to the relatively small area between unsafe declarations. Exploitable C style memory errors simply aren't possible in memory safe languages like Python, for instance, but Python leaves performance on the table which is valuable for codecs. Rust provides a high degree of memory safety while performing as well as C or C++.
By Rust will not by itself make them less
> obscure, opaque, diverse, highly privileged, largely untested, and highly exposed
Rust addresses opaqueness and untestedness directly, by enforcing the language constraints at compile time. Rust addresses the privileged nature of the code and it's exposure directly by disallowing the most common bugs used to gain access to that privileged execution. Obscurity and diversity can both benefit from Rust's integration of Cargo and the resultant ease with which it allows for sharing common code.
In short, expressing this code in an appropriate language can absolutely address and even go some way toward correcting each of those issues.