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Comment by slezakattack | Hacker News Reader

I think you may be conflating the Halting Problem. The problem simply states whether it can be determined that a program, given a set of inputs, will eventually halt. Attempting to use a null pointer can be deterministic at compile time but it's not telling you that your program would halt or not.

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A tool that can reliably tell whether a given program will hit a null deference or not can also trivially be repurposed to solve the Halting Problem. Thus, no such perfect deref tool can exist. The best you can claim is that there’s a tool with few false positives and false negatives. But the original post seems to claim that there’s a perfect one.

Sure, for an arbitrary program that is. One that is annotated to specify if a function returns/accepts null is a subset of this that is solveable.

The halting problem is used as a means to stick one's head in the sand. The halting problem imo is fundamentally uninteresting. A question that's almost as useful and is answerable is whether a program might not halt. Using your mapping to nullability, this tries to answer whether a pointer might be null. That's all the tools are trying to do and the halting problem doesn't get in the way.

No, it can't. You are just playing around with a problem you don't understand (null checks have 0 to do with the halting problem, it's always possible to know that a value will never be null in Java at compile time as long as you have all the source code - no dynamic libraries loaded at runtime)... unless you can actually show the proof of that, that would be really interesting to see.

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