Nulls

[Kevin Bourrillion]

My teammate Colin and I discussed this some and:

On Wed, Sep 26, 2012 at 1:00 PM, Brian Goetz <brian.goetz at oracle.com> wrote:

> Trying again to categorize the choices and identify pros/cons...
>
> Seems like there are four buckets here:
>
> 1.  Ban nulls.  This means that feeding nulls into a Stream MUST produce
> an NPE.
>

This is more null-hostile than even we'd be comfortable with. Does anyone
actually back this?


2.  Ignore nulls.
>

imho, way too surprising. Is anyone backing this?



> 3.  Tolerate nulls.  Streams API takes no position on nulls, but may well
> pass elements to less tolerant destinations (e.g., user-provided lambdas,
> user-provided collections, Optional constructor.)  Nulls may cause NPEs in
> these cases.
>

This is both reasonable and what Guava does.


4.  Embrace nulls.  Ensure that every operation can deal with nulls in a
> well-defined manner.  (This entails, for example, either dropping the
> Optional-bearing methods or making present Optional deal with null.)
>

I'm not sure what exactly this means when I supply a lambda that can't
handle null. You're saying the NPE thrown by that predicate should be *
caught* and handled somehow?



>
>
> I think its safe to say that for each of these, there is some subset of us
> who finds it undesirable.
>
> Doug proposed (2) and (4).  I proposed (3).  Nearly everyone has some
> sympathy for (1) but no one really wants to be that intolerant.
>
>
> Attempted summary of pros/cons:
>
> 1 PRO: Predictable, simple
> 1 CON: Might be overly harsh, interferes with when user might actually
> want to see nulls and can deal accordingly
>
> 2 PRO: Simple
> 2 CON: size() lies, interferes with optimizations, interferes with when
> user might actually want to see nulls and can deal accordingly
>
> 3 PRO: Minimizes distortion on API, implementation in the null-free case
> 3 CON: more complex reasoning about what might happen, op behavior may
> change subtly over time as implementation changes
>
> 4 PRO: Predictable
> 4 CON: sacrifices functionality/safety for sake of a corner case
>
>
>


-- 
Kevin Bourrillion | Java Librarian | Google, Inc. | kevinb at google.com