On Friday, August 20, 2010 16:16:33 bearophile wrote: > Jonathan M Davis: > >There are quite a few people who want Walter to put in null checks in at > >least debug mode, but he's against it and no one has been able to > >convince him.< > > I think that Walter is right here, adding tons of null checks in debug mode > helps a bit (stack traces are good), but it's just a rough patch on the > problem, but it's not a good solution of it.
Considering that other major languages such as C# and Java do these checks with every dereference (though they may optimize it out in some cases), I don't think that it's at all unreasonable to have them in D. They'd be a huge boon to debugging. Now, since D is as concerned about efficiency as it is (being a systems language), it makes sense that those checks would be removed in release mode, but I still think that it would be a very good idea to have them in debug mode. - Jonathan M Davis