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But many of these null pointer dereferences would _also_ be a DoS in a memory-safe, exception-free language like Rust. If you think x isn't null then try to acc

But many of these null pointer dereferences would _also_ be a DoS in a memory-safe, exception-free language like Rust. If you think x isn't null then try to access x.y... something's gonna blow up. If it was in Rust and someone used an unwrap() but there was no value, panic would DoS the system in much the same way, right? (Same for Java, or C#, or what have you, though each connection would probably be in a try/catch so no real harm done, most likely.)

masklinn 12y ago
> If it was in Rust and someone used an unwrap() but there was no value, panic would DoS the system in much the same way, right? A big difference is that the developer would have made the explicit choice at that point to dereference a pointer know to possibly be null. There's no implicit null (and having to wonder "by hand" for each pointer whether or not it could be null, with the risk that changes in any previous operation make make non-nullable pointers nullable without warning). > Same for Java, or C#, or what have you Java and C# also use implicit pervasive nullability, and at least deref'ing a null pointer there is a defined behavior.