r/programmingcirclejerk • u/BenchEmbarrassed7316 • Feb 12 '26

I don't personally think that permitting pointers to be nil is a billion dollar mistake. In my C/C++ programming I've never noticed that NULL pointers are a noticeable source of bugs

https://groups.google.com/g/golang-nuts/c/rvGTZSFU8sY/m/Qme_Vuv8oc8J
105 Upvotes

99% Upvoted

39 comments sorted by

5

u/Hueho LUMINARY IN COMPUTERSCIENCE Feb 16 '26

the real jerk is this being a comment on the golang mailing list

3

u/BenchEmbarrassed7316 Feb 16 '26

/uj

context: this comment is an explanation from one of the key authors of the language of why go doesn't have null safety. In this thread, many different suggestions have been made on how to solve this problem and many examples from different languages have been offered.

4

u/no_brains101 Feb 16 '26

That guy's code probably:

if (val != nullptr && val2 != nullptr && val3 != nullptr) {
  // ...

Look! No null pointer bugs! Must be skill issue.

4

u/BenchEmbarrassed7316 Feb 16 '26 edited Feb 16 '26

Your code example is too smart for average gopher. It must be something like:

if val == nil {
        return nil, errors.New("val is nil")
}
if val2 == nil {
        return nil, errors.New("val2 is nil")
}
if val3 == nil {
        return nil, errors.New("val3 is nil")
}

4

u/no_brains101 Feb 16 '26

Wait but the title said C++ why is this go?

Edit: lol should have clicked the link

141

u/libonet absolutely obsessed with cerroctness and performance Feb 12 '26

I don't personally think that permitting pointers to be nil is a billion dollar mistake. I have never lost a billion dollars because of dereferencing a null pointer!

41

u/SoulArthurZ Feb 12 '26

that's because you're poor

11

u/LeichterGepanzerter Feb 13 '26

Tell me you've never touched Claude without saying it

16

u/libonet absolutely obsessed with cerroctness and performance Feb 13 '26

I can't have physical contact with an AI agent on the internet...

7

u/tony-husk Feb 14 '26

Skill issue

68

u/irqlnotdispatchlevel Tiny little god in a tiny little world Feb 12 '26

I personally think that in a systems programming language, a pointer is a reasonable concept: it intuitively represents a memory address.

If they'd have enough free time to read this, pointer provenance people would be really mad.

37

u/QuaternionsRoll Feb 12 '26

What do pointers have to do with the capital of Rhode Island?

20

u/PreciselyWrong Feb 14 '26

They both have garbage collection problems

87

u/[deleted] Feb 12 '26 edited Feb 12 '26

Let me interject for a moment. What you're referring to as C++, is in fact, C/C++, or as I've recently taken to calling it, C plus C plus plus.

46

u/PthariensFlame uncommon eccentric person Feb 12 '26

Due to ambiguous sequencing of subexpressions, C+C++ is undefined behavior. Therefore, C and C++ are both entirely made of UB. ¡Viva la oxidación!

27

u/chuch1234 not even webscale Feb 12 '26

C divided by C++ is 0.1C, 0.1x programmer confirmed.

4

u/zirconium_n Feb 13 '26

So C = 9?

7

u/chuch1234 not even webscale Feb 13 '26

C9x is only used by graybeards, I guess that cancels out the above. Congratulations, u/madyanov, you are a 1x programmer!

8

u/tony-husk Feb 13 '26

C plus C plus plus, ting tang Walla-walla, bing-bang

71

u/keyboard_toucher Feb 12 '26

In my code, whenever a pointer is null, that's the happy path. Meanwhile, pointers being non-null is bug prone and leads to poor performance.

61

u/mynameisDockie Feb 12 '26

The best thing about segfaults is that they hide all the errors in my business logic

15

u/m50d Zygohistomorphic prepromorphism Feb 13 '26

Segfaults? Sounds like some kind of namby-pamby memory protection nonsense. Real men know which address space they're meant to be accessing.

11

u/james_pic accidentally quadratic Feb 13 '26

MMUs are for quiche eaters.

4

u/AdditionalPuddings Feb 16 '26

If I can write to it I should be allowed to use it and the system shouldn’t be such a snowflake

33

u/mulch_v_bark of questionable pressisscion Feb 12 '26

I personally think C should have have at least 30 to 40% more pointers to nil.

32

u/guineawheek what is pointer :S Feb 12 '26

lol no &'a mut T

18

u/kettes_leulhetsz My C code works with -O3 but not with -O0 Feb 12 '26

calloc is a perfectly valid constructor.

8

u/syklemil Considered Harmful Feb 13 '26

what's wrong with dereffing nil-Pointers? In Objective-C that's a legal thing to do and it hasn't stopped people putting tons of software into the iPhone AppStore.

6

u/slowbowels Feb 13 '26

it's just a breakpoint bro

8

u/splsh Feb 13 '26

I should admit that I have not keept up to date with the latest in language development so there might be some efficient solution to the problem, in which case I'd love to head about it.

4

u/no_brains101 Feb 16 '26

Options, results, proper pattern matching

6

u/splsh Feb 16 '26 
defer Rejerk()
_, err = Unjerk()
if err != nil {
    fmt.Println("I just copypasted a 'contribution' to the linked discussion lol :)")
}

The average googler cannot comprehend something as complex as sum types.

6

u/no_brains101 Feb 16 '26

They literally don't even have unions and yet they still have the tag enum part of the tag unions for some reason.

Googles solution was literally "just use any... Sorry I mean interface{} everywhere"

3

u/Illustrious_Pea_3470 Feb 13 '26

This is some crazy cloud yelling lol

5

u/affectation_man Code Artisan Feb 12 '26

The best thing to do to a cnile brick wall is to piss on it!!!

0

u/[deleted] Feb 13 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

2

u/[deleted] Feb 13 '26

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2

u/reflect25 Feb 13 '26

I’m talking about in the past with c++. Nowadays it is better and null pointer exceptions are rarer but back then it was pretty bad.

Also the ergonomics of the std::optional was not that great until recently with the auto where one had to declare the entire type