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

[deadalnix]

On Sunday, 19 May 2013 at 20:30:28 UTC, Peter Alexander wrote:
> On Sunday, 19 May 2013 at 20:03:24 UTC, Andrei Alexandrescu 
> wrote:
>> You are blowing it out of proportion. Null references are 
>> hardly even on the radar of the bug classes I'm encountering 
>> in the style of programming of the three groups I worked in at 
>> Facebook, and also my previous employers. People I meet at 
>> conferences and consulting gigs never mention null references 
>> as a real problem, although I very often ask about problems. I 
>> find it difficult to agree with you just to be nice.
>
> Just because people don't mention them as a problem doesn't 
> mean it isn't a problem.
>
> For what it's worth, null pointers are a real problem in the 
> code I work on (games). I don't know exactly what you work on, 
> but I find that they are more of a problem in highly stateful, 
> interactive applications. Things like generic libraries, 
> utility programs, compilers, etc. probably won't see the same 
> problems because they aren't very stateful or interactive.
>
> In my experience, null pointers are easy to fix, but the risk 
> of them causes people to litter their code with if (ptr) tests, 
> often with poor handling of the failure case, which can cause 
> subtle bugs (no crash, but unintended code path).
>
> Just my 2c.

Exactly !

Most of time null issue are easy to solve and is just the kind of 
crap that slow you down, and once in a while this ends up being 
an horrible mess.

It is also true that rare path are often badly tested (and 
sometime you have no clue if the thing can be null or not, so you 
don't even know how to test it). Same argument Walter like to 
make about very rare failure cases apply here.