Towards null safety benchmarks for object initialization

Null pointer dereferencing remains one of the major issues in modern object-oriented languages. An obvious addition of keywords to distinguish between never null and possibly null references appears to be insufficient during object initialization when some fields declared as never null may be temporary null before the initialization completes. This work identifies the key reasons of the object initialization problem. It suggests scenarios and metrics to be used as the benchmarks to compare solutions of this problem. Finally, it demonstrates application of the benchmarks on the proposed solution for object initialization in Eiffel.
The article is published in the author’s wording.