On 5/19/13 4:30 PM, Peter Alexander wrote:
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.
OK, this is sensible. One question - would you be willing to type
symbols as NullType!T instead of T to avoid these issues?
Thanks,
Andrei
