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I think golang's slices are a better solution than the linked article.

Slices can still be nil (null), but it isn't an unsafe memory access operation, just another type of potentially useful or potentially errant invocation to handle.

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Zig and Rust also support array slices. But they can’t be null, because that’s - as the article says - a mistake.

https://ziglang.org/documentation/master/#Slices

https://doc.rust-lang.org/book/ch04-03-slices.html

D slices can be null, but they're not a mistake, as the runtime will not let you read/write a 0 length array.

What's the relation between a null slice and a 0-length array?

Neither can be successfully indexed.

Perhaps this is similar to how they work in go?

"var x []int; fmt.Printf(`%p %d`, x, len(x))" outputs "0x0 0"

Indexing "x[0]" results in: "panic: runtime error: index out of range [0] with length 0"

They can also be appended to and then produce a valid slice.

Other languages avoid the mistake by preventing direct access unless either there is a null check or they are declared as non nullable.

Go's slices are more akin to ArrayLists / Vectors in other languages, since they also manage the underlying buffer.

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