On Sunday, 19 May 2013 at 20:03:24 UTC, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
You are blowing it out of proportion. Null references are hardly even on the radar of the bug classes I'm encountering in the style of programming of the three groups I worked in at Facebook, and also my previous employers. People I meet at conferences and consulting gigs never mention null references as a real problem, although I very often ask about problems. I find it difficult to agree with you just to be nice.
Just because people don't mention them as a problem doesn't mean it isn't a problem.
For what it's worth, null pointers are a real problem in the code I work on (games). I don't know exactly what you work on, but I find that they are more of a problem in highly stateful, interactive applications. Things like generic libraries, utility programs, compilers, etc. probably won't see the same problems because they aren't very stateful or interactive.
In my experience, null pointers are easy to fix, but the risk of them causes people to litter their code with if (ptr) tests, often with poor handling of the failure case, which can cause subtle bugs (no crash, but unintended code path).
Just my 2c.
