alt Hacker NewsAnother comment said that returning a * was to avoid returning null which would crash users of the library who didn't check for null. That seems like a C smell to me
Another comment said that returning a * was to avoid returning null which would crash users of the library who didn't check for null. That seems like a C smell to me
Not really. This is like if the char* were an Option<String> but you had programs which stupidly didn't check if the Option had something and assumed it always did. As others have said, Rust would not prevent this.