On Monday, 19 November 2018 at 21:23:31 UTC, 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.
I'm not the only one who has done this. I can't find it right
now, but I've seen at least one person open a bug report
because they misunderstood this as a bug in dmd.
I have been told a couple of times that this isn't something
that needs to be patched in the language, but I don't
understand. It seems like a very easy way to generate a
segfault (and not a NullPointerException or whatever).
What's the reasoning for allowing this?
The natural way forward for D is to add static analysis in the
compiler that tracks use of possibly uninitialized classes (and
perhaps also pointers). This has been discussed many times on the
forums. The important thing with such an extra warning is to
incrementally add it without triggering any false positives.
Otherwise programmers aren't gonna use it.
