Retrofitting spatial safety to hundreds of millions of lines of C++

Google details its deployment of hardened libc++ across Chrome and server-side systems to add bounds checking to standard C++ data structures, improving spatial memory safety with an average ~0.30% performance overhead. Through a staged rollout (testing, baking, gradual production), the effort uncovered 1,000+ bugs, disrupted red team exploits, and reduced fleet-wide segmentation faults by 30%. The company plans to expand bounds checking beyond the standard library, migrate to Safe Buffers, and improve interoperability with memory-safe languages to further raise the security baseline.