Why does nobody seem to think that `null` is a serious problem in D?

[Neia Neutuladh]

On Mon, 19 Nov 2018 21:23:31 +0000, Jordi Gutiérrez Hermoso wrote:
> When I was first playing with D, I managed to create a segfault by doing
> `SomeClass c;` and then trying do something with the object I thought I
> had default-created, by analogy with C++ syntax. Seasoned D programmers
> will recognise that I did nothing of the sort and instead created c is
> null and my program ended up dereferencing a null pointer.

Programmers coming from nearly any language other than C++ would find it 
expected and intuitive that declaring a class instance variable leaves it 
null.

The compiler *could* give you a warning that you're using an uninitialized 
variable in a way that will lead to a segfault, but that sort of flow 
analysis gets hard fast.

If you wanted the default constructor to be called implicitly, that would 
make @nogc functions behave significantly differently (they'd forbid 
declarations without explicit initialization or would go back to default 
null), and it would be a problem for anything that doesn't have a no-args 
constructor (again, this would either be illegal or go back to null).

Easier for everything to be consistent and everything to be initialized to 
null.