[Yoric]

Assuming that nobody catches the NPE by accident or error (according to my experience in Java, it's a pretty big assumption), yes, they pretty much are.

The big difference is that, in Java, you typically get your NPE because you didn't know/didn't check that your pointer could be `null` – in other words, the default behavior of the language is to NPE. In Rust, the default behavior of the language is to inform the developer that they need to check. They may decide to explicitly assert that the pointer is not null, causing a crash if it is, but that's a conscious choice.

For instance, in my Rust code, pretty much every occurrence of `unwrap()` or `expect()` contains a comment explaining which invariant guarantees that the call will succeed. I don't think I have ever seen any comments associated to a member access in Java.