I largely agree, but that would get very tedious because there's no way to create a pointer type that is guaranteed to be non-null in C. You'd end up having to

I largely agree, but that would get very tedious because there's no way to create a pointer type that is guaranteed to be non-null in C. You'd end up having to do a lot of unnecessary checks because of that. People say optionals are the solution, but the way I see it it's the other way around. Pointers types that allow NULL are basically optionals, and the problem is that we use them everywhere, even for things that are not optional. What we are missing are pointer types for things that are not optional. And the pointer type with a guaranteed value needs to be as easy to use as the nullable pointer type, if not easier. Otherwise it won't always be used when it should be.