safety: null checks

[Q. Schroll]

On Sunday, 22 November 2020 at 11:52:13 UTC, Dibyendu Majumdar 
wrote:
> Above fails because b is null. But why doesn't the compiler say 
> so? It seems like a very basic safety check.

Nullpointer exceptions aren't a safety issue since the program 
crashes. For it to be a safety issue, it would need to have "bad 
consequences" e.g. writes to memory at locations the program 
isn't supposed to.