I don't think that casting a range of bits as some other arbitrary type "is a bug nobody sees coming".

C++ compilers also warn you that this is likely an issue and will fail to compile if configured to do so. But it will let you do it if you really want to.

That's why I love C++

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[–] HER0@beehaw.org 1 points 5 months ago

It is fair to have a preference for exceptions. It sounds like there may be a misunderstanding on how Option works.

Have you used languages that didn't have null and had Option instead? If we look at Rust, you can't forget not to check it: it is impossible to get the Some of an Option without dealing with the None. You can't forget this. You can mess up in a lot of other ways, but you explicitly have to decide how to handle that potential None case.

If you want it to fail fast and obvious, there are ways to do this. For example you, you can use the unwrap() method to get the contained Some value or panic if it is None, expect() to do the same but with a custom panic message, the ? operator to get the contained Some value or return the function with None, etc. Tangentially, these also work for Result, which can be Ok or Err.

It is pretty common to use these methods in places where you always want to fail somewhere that you don't expect should have a None or where you don't want your code to deal with the consequences of something unexpected. You have decided this and live with the consequences, instead of it implicitly happening/you forgetting to deal with it.