Null references - addendum

My recent article turned out to be quite popular, however it seems that people focus on the problem of undefined behavior rather than optimization itself. Quick clarification then, so that we’re all on the same page. I do not advocate relying on undefined behaviors. They are… undefined (duh). I merely noticed in practice you can have ‘null references’, just as you can have null pointers. I also would be very surprised if there was any compiler that actually generates code testing against null pointer dereference. It’d completely kill the performance of compiled application.