On: Golang: Know Your 'Nil'

[stouset]

One can say that about literally any language with nil/null, and it's been empirically demonstrated beyond reasonable doubt at this point.

The reality is that you don't know where your nil-dereference bugs exist because your language doesn't detect and force you to eliminate them.

[dgellow → stouset]

A nil-dereference is very easy to spot in production: you have a panic and a stack trace in your logs.

Which means you can check after a few years how many nil-pointer exceptions you got in your actual system. In my experience that numbers is really low.

[yawaramin → dgellow]

> very easy to spot in production: you have a panic and a stack trace in your logs.

Not a great experience for your users though. And definitely not great for developers who get paged to handle these production incidents that could have been caught at compile time.