Struct with default ctor (Was: [dmd-beta] dmd 2.064 beta take 2)

[deadalnix]

On Sunday, 19 May 2013 at 12:06:01 UTC, Simen Kjaeraas wrote:
> My experience is the complete opposite - I think maybe 20% of 
> bugs at my job
> are caused by null references. But as you say, they are very 
> easily fixed.
>

Sometime they are super freaking hard. I have a horror story 
debugging Apache Cayenne : http://cayenne.apache.org/ because it 
was throwing NPE on a race condition that would never show up 
once the code is instrumented.

A reference was null for a short moment and then set to 
something. Due to concurrency, in extreme cases it could be seen 
as null where it was assumed everywhere to be set.

> That said, two things to consider:
>
> How many of the functions you write actually need to accept 
> nullable
> pointers/references?
>
> If non-nullable was the default, how often would you explicitly 
> ask for a
> nullable pointer/reference?

Not that much and I'd rather be warned when it is the case.