The fact that safe language implementations have to think hard about how to handle null pointer exceptions safely should have been a warning sign that null pointers are a bad thing to have in a language. Sadly nearly always unheeded.
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Even if you do that, those landing pads have a code size cost. Every pointer load has to have a nontrivial amount of metadata, in case it faults.
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And even THEN, you added a whole ton of extra control flow edges, for the null-pointer-exception cases. This inhibits optimizations because it generates a whole slew of extra basic blocks. Control flow soup.
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