Any::isNull check

[Brian Goetz]

If you're working with an any-T, you don't know whether its a reference 
or value.  So you still have to worry about NPE.

But don't get too worked up about the particular expression of 
Any.isNull().  This is just the short-term, expedient hack to get the 
libraries port moving, its not a serious suggestion of how things will 
eventually look.

On 12/16/2015 10:42 AM, Vitaly Davidovich wrote:
> What's the use case of using Any.isNull when you don't know you're working
> with reference types? I'd expect comparison would be x.equals(T.default) in
> the generic context.
>
> On Wednesday, December 16, 2015, Paul Benedict <pbenedict at apache.org> wrote:
>
>> When a method is specialized for values, Any::isNull can only return
>> "false", which means if(Any.isNull(o)) can only ever have one outcome --
>> the other code branch can be discarded by the compiler. I know it's too
>> early to talk about optimizations :-) but will javac be smart enough to
>> recognize this optimization? Is it on your list for the future?
>>
>> Cheers,
>> Paul
>>
>