Bartosz Milewski wrote:
What bothers me is that this is equivalent to saying that a seg fault caused by null dereference can be caught only if the programmer puts explicit runtime checks before it happens. I would say that reaks of C philosophy, except that in most C++ implementation I've been working with you can simply catch a seg fault. I wouldn't mind not being able to catch a seg fault in a language where it's impossible to have an unitialized reference. But both in Java and in D it's very easy to get into this situation (in fact, it's easier in D) because of hidden reference semantics of class objects. Which ties nicely with the discussion of nullable types.
That is annoying, and there are libraries that fix it. It's already handled on Windows by default; why isn't it handled on Linux?
