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Was it a billion dollar mistake?


TL;DR null pointer dereferences are empirically the easiest class of invalid memory addresses to catch at runtime, and are the least common kind of invalid memory addresses that happen in memory unsafe languages. The trivial solutions to remove the “problem” null pointers have numerous trade-offs which are not obvious, and the cause of why people think it is a “problem” comes from a specific kind of individual-element mindset. Most people have probably heard of the Billion Dollar Mistake before, which was coined/invented by Tony Hoare: the inventor of null references/pointers.

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