"I call it my billion-dollar mistake." - Tony Hoare on inventing the NULL reference.
If you've ever written C or C++, you know the pain of a Segmentation Fault. But why does C still use NULL, and how did Rust completely eliminate it without sacrificing performance or memory?
In this video, we dive under the hood to compare C pointers and Rust's. Using visual HTML animations (and a few cat memes 🐈), we explore memory layouts, how OS zero-page protection works, and the magic of Rust's "Null Pointer Optimization" (Zero-cost abstraction).
If you want to understand what actually happens in your RAM when you write code, you are in the right place!
Are you Team C or Team Rust? Let me know in the comments what low-level comparison you want to see next!
🔔 Don't forget to Like & Subscribe for more "Under the Hood" programming content!