alt Hacker Newsimproving crappy codebases without breaking anything. Bad .NET developers are forever doing null checks because they write weird and unreliable code. So if you have to fix up some pile of rotting code, it can help you slowly iterate towards something more sane over time.
For example in my last gig, the original devs didn't understand typing, so they were forever writing typing code at low levels to check types (with marker interfaces) to basically implement classes outside of the classes. Then of course there was lots of setting of mutable state outside of constructors, so basically null was always in play at any moment at any time.
I would have loved this feature while working for them, but alas; they were still on 4.8.1 and refused to allow me to upgrade the codebase to .net core, so it wouldn't have helped anyway.
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Unfortunately, I suspect this will just makes it easier to keep writing sloppy code.
These null checks are actually for Optionals in the type system. The whole standard library and many better packages use nullability and thus indicate what can and cannot be null ever. And structs can never be null.
So no, c# are not constantly null-checking more than in Rust