On Thursday, 10 July 2014 at 18:18:54 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
You are totally missing the point if you consider this even
comparable
replacement. Reason why non-nullable types are awesome because
you are 100% sure
compiler will force you to handle null cases and if program
compiles it is
guaranteed to be safe in that regard. What you propose makes
hardly any difference.
I'll risk annoying everyone by repeating at this point "what do
you propose". Making non-null pointers the default is going to
break every D program and so is not acceptable.
Unfortunately I can only propose to do nothing and abandon this
idea for any foreseeable future. It is one of sinkholes which
consume lot of discussion time but all good solutions are
unacceptable and all acceptable solutions are not practical.
One possible compromise is to define a DScanner rule to assume
all normal pointers/references non-nullable by convention and
enforce it for Phobos . Don't know how realistic it can be
though, most likely not at all.
