Void-safety (and related things)

[Ary Borenszweig]

Jason House wrote:
> I've recently convinced myself that nullability should be the exception instead of the norm. So much of the code I write in C#/D uses reference objects assuming they're non-null. Only in certain special cases do I handle null explicitly. The issue is that if any special case is missed/mishandled, it can spread to other code.
> 
> I'm also too lazy to write non-null contracts in D. They also have far less value since violations are not caught at compile time (or better yet, in my IDE as I write code).
> 
> It may be as simple as having the following 3 types:
> T // non-nullable
> T? // nullable, safe
> T* //  nullable, unsafe
> 
> I'd also like to remove all default initialization in favor of use of uninitialized variable errors. Default initialization in D is cute, but it is not a solution for programmer oversight. Single-threaded code will reproducibly do the wrong thing, but may be harder to notice in the first place. The very fact that the signalling nan change has made it into D shows that people want this type of behavior!

Yes. Default initialization is really week against uninitialized 
variables errors. You notice the errors of the first one at runtime, and 
the errors of the second one at compile-time.

But I don't see that changing anytime soon... (I think it's because "it 
gets hard").