@safe and null dereferencing

[Moritz Maxeiner via Digitalmars-d]

On Thursday, 27 July 2017 at 18:46:16 UTC, Jonathan M Davis wrote:
> On Thursday, July 27, 2017 11:03:02 Steven Schveighoffer via 
> Digitalmars-d wrote:
>> A possibility:
>>
>> "@safe D does not support platforms or processes where 
>> dereferencing a null pointer does not crash the program. In 
>> such situations, dereferencing null is not defined, and @safe 
>> code will not prevent this from happening."
>>
>> In terms of not marking C/C++ code safe, I am not convinced we 
>> need to go that far, but it's not as horrible a prospect as 
>> having to unmark D @safe code that might dereference null.
>
> I see no problem whatsoever requiring that the platform 
> segfaults when you dereference null. Anything even vaguely 
> modern will do that. Adding extra null checks is therefore 
> redundant and complicates the compiler for no gain whatsoever.

Except that when someone gets (root) access to any modern Linux 
servers running D services he now has an easy way to create a 
denial of service attack the owner of the server won't easily be 
able to find the cause of, because pretty much everything *looks* 
right, except that somehow the D services hang.