RFR(L): 8218628: Add detailed message to NullPointerException describing what is null.

[Peter Levart]

On 3/29/19 8:49 AM, Lindenmaier, Goetz wrote:
> So I want to withdraw my claim that NPEs are thrown frequently.
> Probably I was biased by my compiler construction background,
> remembering NPE checks are all over the place in the code.
>
> But I think I can still keep the claim that the message is
> printed rarely.
>
> I'll adapt the JEP saying something like this:
> "While exceptions are supposed to be thrown rarely, i.e., only
> In exceptional situations, most are swallowed without ever
> looking at the message. Thus, overhead in getMessage() will
> not fall into account."

Is this really a realistic assumption? That NPE exceptions are mostly 
swallowed in most programs despite the fact that swallowing exceptions 
(and throwing them to control the flow) is an anti-pattern? Is majority 
of code really so badly written? I would expect that most programs 
contain an exception handler of some kind that at least logs all 
unexpected exceptions.

I think JDK should assume that NPEs are not frequent in most well 
written programs. Because in well written programs all unexpected 
exceptions are at least logged somewhere and this alone guarantees that 
programs are eventually "fixed" to not throw them frequently...

Regards, Peter

>
> Best regards,
>    Goetz.