Comment by mrkeen
9 months ago
> My impression is that this is due to their non-robust programming style.
It's been 50+ years. I don't think that it's worthwhile just telling the programmer to do a better job.
> They do not add fallback behavior when e.g. receiving a null object. It would still be a bug, but could be a log entry instead of crash.
This is a pretty big feedback loop:
* The programmer puts the null into the code
* The code is released
* The right conditions occur and the player triggers it
* IF DONE SKILLFULLY AND CORRECTLY the game is able to recover from the null-dereference, write it out to a log, and get that log back to the developers.
* The programmer takes the null out of the code.
If you don't do the first step, you don't get stuck doing the others either.
50+ years and people still fail to grasp this.
You have to put something (an optional, or a default constructed object in a useless state) and all you did was to skip the null check. In case of optional, you introduced a stack rewind or a panic. Everything else stayed the same. Maybe that default even deleted the hard drive instead of crashing.
Coding is hard. "just don't code" is not the answer. You can avoid something, that doesn't mean it won't show up in some other fashion.
Again, if you disallow unwrapping and panicking at the CI level, you actually force your developers to properly handle these situations.
> You have to put something (an optional, or a default constructed object in a useless state)
No, you really don't. There is no default number, no default string, no default piece of legislation, no default function.