Introducing Nullable Reference Types in C#. Is there hope for D, too?

[jmh530]

On Friday, 17 November 2017 at 14:53:40 UTC, Jonathan M Davis 
wrote:
> [snip] Regardless, given that dereferencing null will segfault, 
> it does not present an @safety problem.
>

@safe is really more of @memorysafe. Null safety is orthogonal to 
memory safety.

I don't really use null much in D currently, so this isn't all 
that important to me ATM. Regardless, I could imagine that if one 
were writing a language from scratch, you could have a default of 
@nullsafe where there is a compile-time error if you violate some 
null safety rules. You could then have a @nullunsafe where these 
compile-time errors are disabled and you throw an exception at 
run-time if you do. @nullunsafe is effectively the default in 
most languages.