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Null pointer bugs are prevented by idiomatic use of Option in Rust, so that’s at least one case where Rust’s focus on correctness prevents memory-safety bugs.

• yencabulator 5y ago
  Yet many Rust code bases are littered with .unwrap(), which undoes that benefit.
  • Ar-Curunir 5y ago
    but it's explicit; you can easily tell which lines of code will panic.
  • Freaky 5y ago
    A great deal of the benefit of Option comes from where it isn't used - you know most things can't be null and simply don't have to think about the possibility. unwrap() bugs are annoying, yes, but at the end of the day they're just a fancy assert(), helpfully spelled out in the code and confined to bits of it where the value is Option<T>. This is a much better situation than a language where nulls can in principle turn up anywhere.