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Comment by kyjasdfwus | Hacker News Reader

Scala seems to be the only language that recognizes the merit of having both unions and ADTs. It even has GADTs!

Haskell also has GADTs: https://ghc.gitlab.haskell.org/ghc/doc/users_guide/exts/gadt..., firstly as an extension and now it's built into the latest version of this year's compiler

You're misinterpreting 'GHC2024'. It's just a language edition, a short hand of enabling a bunch of extensions. You have been able to enable GADTs for many years now, with just a single pragma. It has been built in to GHC for all these years.

Yep, Scala is influenced by Haskell.

Yet ironically Scala is not null safe I believe.

I have been doing scala professionally for a decade, I have probably have 1 NPE per year on average, max. And pretty much never from an established scala lib. It's by convention not to use null - heavy use of Option, etc.

https://docs.scala-lang.org/scala3/reference/experimental/ex...

Opt-in is better than nothing, but in practice I assume this sees little use because it breaks compatibility with old code. Null safety (and type safety in general) has to be present in a programming language from the start; it can't realistically be added as a feature later.

I don't think I agree. C# added it and its gone well and Java is adding null safety without breaking backwards compatibility at all.

If anything, it's a default to have them on in any reasonably recent project - you get that with all templates, default projects, etc. Actively maintained libraries are always expected to come with NRT support. If this is not the case, it's usually a sign the library is maintained by developers who ignore the conventions/guidelines and actively went out of their way to disable them, which usually a strong signal to either file an issue or completely avoid such library.

Similar logic applies to code that has migrated over to .NET 6/8, or any newly written code past ~.NET 5.

Types in old code may be nullable, or not, the compiler doesn't know, so the only way the compiler can ensure null safety for using old code is by enforcing you to do null checks everywhere. That's not very practical. Moreover, the old code itself may still produce null pointer exceptions.

But that doesn't break compatibility like you claimed and it also doesn't support your conclusion that it will not likely be used.

> he compiler doesn't know, so the only way the compiler can ensure null safety for using old code is by enforcing you to do null checks everywhere

This isn't necessarily true. Java's approach is to have 3 types: nullable, non-null, and platform (just like Kotlin). Platform types are types without nullness markers and don't require strict null checks to prevent backwards compatibility breaking. Yes, old code may still product null pointers, but we don't need 100% correctness right away. At some point platform types will be 1% of code in the wild rather than 100%.

> At some point platform types will be 1% of code in the wild rather than 100%.

In the case of Java this could take decades. Or people simply continue to write platform types because they are lazy (the compiler doesn't force them). Then platform types will never decrease substantially.

I don't think that's true and I don't think there is any data to back that up. We've already seen in the C# community rapid adoption of nullness markers. This whole goal post moving and the idea that if we can't have 100% we shouldn't do it at all is a bit exhausting so I think I'm done here. Cheers man.

Well yeah, there is no way around this on the JVM. That's one of the JVM's problems/drawbacks. Everything can be null and everything can throw exceptions.

But in practice, as long as you use only Scala libraries and are careful when using Java libraries it's not really an issue. (speaking as a professional Scala developer for many many years)

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