> It's a hard language design question and people focusing on this specific case have not really considered how it effects anything else. Sadly, language features and constructs are rarely isolated from other things, even the architecture of the code the programmer writes
And my suggestion is that Rust has got the balance right when it comes to pointers. I can use the traditional unsafe nullable pointer *SomeStruct when it can be null and use &SomeStruct when it cannot be NULL in Rust. Initialization can be a bit painful in Rust but the wins are worth it. Yes, initialization can be less efficient in Rust but then most of the time spent is spend in algorithms when they run, not during initialization of the data structure.
Rust has needless complexity when it comes to asynchronous programming. The complexity is off the charts and the language just becomes unusable. But the non-async subset of Rust feels consistent and well engineered from a programming theory perspective.
In summary, Rust has not compromised itself by using non-null references as the default pointer type and neither will Odin, if it takes a different approach towards references. Take the example of OCaml - it also takes a very principled approach towards NULL. OTOH Java suffers from NULL problems as every object could be null in disguise.
Nevertheless Odin is a remarkably clean and powerful language and I'm following its progress closely ! Thanks for building it !