digitalmars.D - Re: Null references (oh no, not again!)
- Alex Burton <alexibu mac.com> Mar 05 2009
Walter Bright Wrote:Daniel Keep wrote:* Accessing arrays out-of-bounds * Dereferencing null pointers * Integer overflow * Accessing uninitialized variables 50% of the bugs in Unreal can be traced to these problems!
Tim Sweeny isn't an amateur; he's responsible, at least in part, for one of the most commercially successful game engines ever. I figure if even he has trouble with these things, it's worth trying to fix them. Note that D already solves #1 and #4, LDC could give us #3... that just leaves #2. :D
1 and 4 are pernicious, memory corrupting, hard to find problems. 2 is easy to find, does not corrupt memory. It isn't even in the same continent as 1 and 4 are.
The full cost to an enterprise of a catastrophic bug (which all 4 of these are ) in a released piece of software are almost certainly many orders of magnitude larger than the cost of programmer time to find and fix it. Alex
Mar 05 2009