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Scala with Explicit Nulls

Authors Abel Nieto , Yaoyu Zhao, Ondřej Lhoták , Angela Chang, Justin Pu

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Author Details

Abel Nieto
  • University of Waterloo, Canada
Yaoyu Zhao
  • University of Waterloo, Canada
Ondřej Lhoták
  • University of Waterloo, Canada
Angela Chang
  • University of Waterloo, Canada
Justin Pu
  • University of Waterloo, Canada

Funding

This research was supported by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada and by the Waterloo-Huawei Joint Innovation Lab.

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Sébastien Doeraene, Fengyun Liu, Guillaume Martres, and Martin Odersky for their feedback on our explicit nulls design.

Cite AsGet BibTex

Abel Nieto, Yaoyu Zhao, Ondřej Lhoták, Angela Chang, and Justin Pu. Scala with Explicit Nulls. In 34th European Conference on Object-Oriented Programming (ECOOP 2020). Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs), Volume 166, pp. 25:1-25:26, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2020)
https://doi.org/10.4230/LIPIcs.ECOOP.2020.25

Abstract

The Scala programming language makes all reference types implicitly nullable. This is a problem, because null references do not support most operations that do make sense on regular objects, leading to runtime errors. In this paper, we present a modification to the Scala type system that makes nullability explicit in the types. Specifically, we make reference types non-nullable by default, while still allowing for nullable types via union types. We have implemented this design for explicit nulls as a fork of the Dotty (Scala 3) compiler. We evaluate our scheme by migrating a number of Scala libraries to use explicit nulls. Finally, we give a denotational semantics of type nullification, the interoperability layer between Java and Scala with explicit nulls. We show a soundness theorem stating that, for variants of System F_ω that model Java and Scala, nullification preserves values of types.

Subject Classification

ACM Subject Classification
  • Software and its engineering → General programming languages
  • Theory of computation → Denotational semantics
  • Theory of computation → Type theory
  • Software and its engineering → Interoperability
Keywords
  • Scala
  • Java
  • nullability
  • language interoperability
  • type systems

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Supplementary Materials

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