On Mon, 19 Nov 2018 21:23:31 +0000, Jordi Gutiérrez Hermoso wrote: > When I was first playing with D, I managed to create a segfault by doing > `SomeClass c;` and then trying do something with the object I thought I > had default-created, by analogy with C++ syntax. Seasoned D programmers > will recognise that I did nothing of the sort and instead created c is > null and my program ended up dereferencing a null pointer.
Programmers coming from nearly any language other than C++ would find it expected and intuitive that declaring a class instance variable leaves it null. The compiler *could* give you a warning that you're using an uninitialized variable in a way that will lead to a segfault, but that sort of flow analysis gets hard fast. If you wanted the default constructor to be called implicitly, that would make @nogc functions behave significantly differently (they'd forbid declarations without explicit initialization or would go back to default null), and it would be a problem for anything that doesn't have a no-args constructor (again, this would either be illegal or go back to null). Easier for everything to be consistent and everything to be initialized to null.
