I would only partially agree that Kotlin is "much safer."
As one example, I just learned (by way of a nasty production app crash) that Kotlin chose to make all checked exceptions silently unchecked. Kind of a stunning own-goal for a language from 2010.
I imagine the one they were thinking of was Rust, since it seems like that's more likely to be used where Go or C++ is, and it actually lets you use what are basically restricted pointers. But yeah, any language with an Option type that forces you to deal with the empty variant before you can use the data would have prevented it, including Haskell.
You can also just use a validation library of some sort such as go-playground/validator for Go and issues will sort themselves out by enforcing the loaded schema.
Good luck re-writing 25 years of C++ though.
It was Google's study that showed almost all bugs are in new code (and this was also the case of this incident)
You don't need to rewrite everything to prevent the majority of new bugs, it's enough to protect new code and keep the battle tested stuff around
You can do that for new binaries. For existing ones you can't really or you get in a worse place for a long time.
Which one do you have in mind? Haskell?
Kotlin is very easily adoptable in existing Java systems and is much safer (although not guaranteed safe)
Zig is fairly easy to adopt in existing C systems and is guaranteed null safe (although not use after free safe)
Rust, although quite safe, bears a fairly high adoption cost as existing code often cannot be ported directly.
Borgo (https://github.com/borgo-lang/borgo) is a nil safe language that compiles to go, so is easily adoptable in existing Go systems.
Borgo has a lot of weird things going on with it. There are only 2 contributors, don't see a license, and is very inactive.
Of the other choices given, I think people shouldn't underestimate Kotlin.
I would only partially agree that Kotlin is "much safer."
As one example, I just learned (by way of a nasty production app crash) that Kotlin chose to make all checked exceptions silently unchecked. Kind of a stunning own-goal for a language from 2010.
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Vlang is a much more active go variant with nil safety.
But it gets a lot of hate in PL circles for reasons I don't completely understand.
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Java Optional is just as safe as Kotlin Option (and predates it by a couple years).
Scala, Kotlin, Java you just can’t get away from null :/
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I imagine the one they were thinking of was Rust, since it seems like that's more likely to be used where Go or C++ is, and it actually lets you use what are basically restricted pointers. But yeah, any language with an Option type that forces you to deal with the empty variant before you can use the data would have prevented it, including Haskell.
You can also just use a validation library of some sort such as go-playground/validator for Go and issues will sort themselves out by enforcing the loaded schema.
Does it really matter which specific language?
The previous comment seemed to think the specific language mattered.
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It's been a long time, but didn't google also have a whole Java library of data structures, utilities and annotations for avoiding using nulls at all?
Thank god we have Go! /s