Question

I’m designing a language, and I’m wondering if it’s reasonable to make reference types non-nullable by default, and use ‘?’ for nullable value and reference types. Are there any problems with this? What would you do about this:

class Foo {     Bar? b;     Bar b2;     Foo() {         b.DoSomething(); //valid, but will cause exception         b2.DoSomething(); //?     } } 

Answer 1

My current language design philosophy is that nullability should be something a programmer is forced to ask for, not given by default on reference types (in this, I agree with Tony Hoare – Google for his recent QCon talk).

On this specific example, with the unnullable b2, it wouldn’t even pass static checks: Conservative analysis cannot guarantee that b2 isn’t NULL, so the program is not semantically meaningful.

My ethos is simple enough. References are an indirection handle to some resource, which we can traverse to obtain access to that resource. Nullable references are either an indirection handle to a resource, or a notification that the resource is not available, and one is never sure up front which semantics are being used. This gives either a multitude of checks up front (Is it null? No? Yay!), or the inevitable NPE (or equivalent). Most programming resources are, these days, not massively resource constrained or bound to some finite underlying model – null references are, simplistically, one of…

• Laziness: ‘I’ll just bung a null in here’. Which frankly, I don’t have too much sympathy with
• Confusion: ‘I don’t know what to put in here yet’. Typically also a legacy of older languages, where you had to declare your resource names before you knew what your resources were.
• Errors: ‘It went wrong, here’s a NULL’. Better error reporting mechanisms are thus essential in a language
• A hole: ‘I know I’ll have something soon, give me a placeholder’. This has more merit, and we can think of ways to combat this.

Of course, solving each of the cases that NULL current caters for with a better linguistic choice is no small feat, and may add more confusion that it helps. We can always go to immutable resources, so NULL in it’s only useful states (error, and hole) isn’t much real use. Imperative technqiues are here to stay though, and I’m frankly glad – this makes the search for better solutions in this space worthwhile.