[clausecker]

Really bad idea.

Silently returning some (the wrong) value is always worse than catching the error right then and their and panicking. A panic is a noticeable symptom of something just having go wrong that is easy to chase after and debug. A silently returned wrong value just causes data corruption down the line, at great pain. It is very annoying to debug, in particular if people start to some times rely on this behaviour as an intentional part of their data flow.

[Lvl999Noob]

I agree. I prefer Optionals over Nulls in any case. This was just a thought of what if Go went all the way instead of just halfway. In my ideal language, you would have explicit assignments and compiler checked (runtime checked if absolutely necessary) pointer validity (with allowed length) at construction. As far as I know, the only time you need to make a pointer and say "trust me" is when doing MMIO so that can given its own mechanism. If it exists in the program state, it's valid.