safety: null checks

[Ola Fosheim Grostad]

On Monday, 23 November 2020 at 00:33:35 UTC, Paul Backus wrote:
> On Monday, 23 November 2020 at 00:26:26 UTC, Dibyendu Majumdar 
> wrote:
>>
>> Hmm, null values are not the same as dereferncing null values.
>> A null in itself is okay, but dereferencing null cannot be.
>
> @safe code is allowed to dereference pointers, and there's no 
> way for the compiler to know at compile time which pointers are 
> null and which aren't. So, either @safe code must be forbidden 
> from creating null pointers in the first place, or it must be 
> allowed to dereference them.
>
> Remember, @safe doesn't just mean "code that's memory safe", it 
> means "code that the compiler can *prove* is memory safe."

Well, the spec said that the value should be valid, which null by 
definition should not have, then the example comment mentioned a 
well defined crash which is a contradiction in terms.

So the spec is unsound.

What you would require from a high level language is that 
dereferencing null pointers is caught either at compile time or 
at runtime. But that is slow on some platforms. So this is just 
an example of the implementation being the spec, and actual 
document does not make sense in a general setting.