Jarrett Billingsley wrote:
On Sun, Sep 27, 2009 at 2:07 PM, Jeremie Pelletier <[email protected]> wrote:
Yes and no. It introduces an "if" statement for null checking, but only
for nullable references. If you know your reference can't be null it should
be non-nullable, and then you don't need to check.
I much prefer explicit null checks than implicit ones I can't control.
Nonnull types do not create implicit null checks. Nonnull types DO NOT
need to be checked. And nullable types WOULD force explicit null
checks.
Forcing checks on nullables is just as bad, not all nullables need to be
checked every time they're used.
What about non-nan floats? Or non-invalid characters? I fear nonnull
references are a first step in the wrong direction. The focus should be
about implementing variable initialization checks to the compiler, since
this solves the issue with any variable, not just references. The flow
analysis can also be reused for many other optimizations.
hash_t foo(Object o) { return o.toHash(); }
foo(null); // bamf, I just killed your function.
Forcing initialization of locals does NOT solve all the problems that
nonnull references would.
You didn't kill my function, you shot yourself in the foot. Something
trivial to debug.
