Disallow null references in safe code?

[Timon Gehr]

On 02/03/2014 12:09 AM, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
>
> A front-end pass could replace the dead dereference with a guard that
> asserts the reference is not null.

I don't think this would be feasible. (The front-end pass would need to 
simulate all back-end passes in order to find all the references that 
might be proven dead.)

> More generally this is a matter that
> can be fixed but currently is not receiving attention by backend writers.
>
> Andrei

Yup.