[oraziorillo]

My experience on this project was that the checks proved to be useful way before I could run the program for the first time.

The first version of the code had relatively few null checks. Later I went through and added them consistently at function boundaries, and that process ended up revealing a surprising number of bugs and bad assumptions.

Sanitizers and static analyzers could have surely caught many of these issues later, but adding the checks was a useful way to reason about the code while writing it. It felt less defensive and more proactively preventive.

[srean]

Yeah you can have a lighter work desk that way. You bring in the heavy tools later.

[uecker]

Interestingly, I would see it just the other way round. It is easier for me to reason about the code if it not cluttered with null checks and a null sanitizer is I would see as a very light-weight tool. I may put an assert some once in while if such an assumption needs to be made very explicit.