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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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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I agree with you that null pointers are bad but "it's hard to do with LLVM" is really more of an indictment of LLVM in this case. Null handling in the JVM isn't that big of a deal.
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