Yes, and they are just two usages of pointers. The fact is that, whatever you ca... | Hacker News

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		alerighi on Feb 28, 2022 \| parent \| context \| favorite \| on: Fork() is evil; vfork() is goodness; afork() would... Yes, and they are just two usages of pointers. The fact is that, whatever you call it, null pointer, nullable reference, optional, you have to put in a language a concept of "reference to an object that can reference a non valid object".

initplus on March 1, 2022 [–]

Every pointer you can replace by a pass-by-value optional or a non-nullable reference is one less opportunity for errors.

Providing more restricted types that can replace raw pointers for many use cases makes languages safer.

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