[article] Language Design Deal Breakers

[Walter Bright]

On 5/27/2013 11:27 AM, Timon Gehr wrote:
> On 05/27/2013 01:12 AM, Ziad Hatahet wrote:
>> On Sun, May 26, 2013 at 3:48 PM, Timon Gehr <timon.gehr at gmx.ch
>> <mailto:timon.gehr at gmx.ch>> wrote:
>>
>>     IIRC the damage done by software bugs to US economy alone is
>>     estimated to be around 60 billion a year. One billion damage done by
>>     dereferenceable null pointers appears to be an optimistic estimate.
>>
>>
>>
>> Interesting. Source? :)
>>
>> --
>> Ziad
>>
>>
>
> Eg. here:
> http://www.ashireporter.org/HomeInspection/Articles/Software-Errors-Cost-U-S-Economy-59-5-Billion-Annually/740
>
>
> I think many other studies estimate the cost to be higher.

Nobody is doubting the high cost of software bugs. The doubt here is that null 
pointers are far and away the most common source of bugs (and I mean source, not 
just the symptom).

The only way to resolve this would be to to go through the bug databases of 
resolved bugs and their fixes and actually count which ones were due to a null 
pointer that would have been caught by nonnull types.