The way Ceylon handles null is one of the big attractions of the language. Ceylon features a typed null value. The object null is just an instance of the perfectly ordinary class Null from the point of view of the type system. But when the compiler backend transforms Ceylon code to Java bytecode or JavaScript, the class Null is eliminated and the value null is represented as a native Java or JavaScript null at the virtual machine level.
This is great for interoperation with native Java or JavaScript. However, when designing our Java interop, we had to take into account that Java’s null isn’t typed, and that the information about whether a Java method might return null, or whether a parameter of a Java method accepts null is “missing” and not available to the
Ceylon typechecker. I think we’ve done the right thing here, but the approach we took has surprised a couple of people, so I guess it’s well worth calling explicit attention to what we’ve done and why. Consider the following useful method of java.lang.String:
public String toUpperCase(Locale locale) { ... }
By checking the implementation of this method, I determined that:
toUpperCase()never returnsnull, and that- the argument to
localemust not benull.
Unfortunately, this information isn’t available to the Ceylon typechecker. So perhaps you might expect that Ceylon would take a very heavyhanded route, treating the return type of toUpperCase() as String?, and forcing me to explicitly narrow to String using an assertion:
assert (exists uppercased = javaString.toUpperCase(locale));
In fact, this is not what Ceylon does. This approach would make interoperation with Java a nightmare, resulting in code full of hundreds of useless assertions. You would need an assertion essentially every time you call a native method. Worse, the “heavyhanded” approach would prevent me from passing the value null as an argument to a parameter of a Java method. What would it mean to “assert” that a method parameter accepts null? That’s not an assertion that can be tested at runtime! Nor would the “heavyhanded” approach in practice even protect me from NullPointerExceptions. As soon as I call native Java code, a NullPointerException can occur inside the Java code I call, and there’s nothing Ceylon can do to protect me from that. So instead, Ceylon takes a “lighthanded” approach at the boundary between Java and Ceylon, letting you write this:
String uppercased = javaString.toUpperCase(locale);
The typechecker knows this is a Java method, and that the information about null is missing, so it assumes that you know what you’re doing and that toUpperCase() never returns null. But what if you’ve got it wrong, and toUpperCase() does return null at runtime? We would not want that null value to propagate into Ceylon values declared to contain a not-null type! What the Ceylon compiler does is insert a null check on the return value of toUpperCase(), and throws a NullPointerException to indicate the problem. If you ever see that NullPointerException, at runtime, you’re supposed to change your code to this:
String? uppercased = javaString.toUpperCase(locale);
This is essentially the best Ceylon can do given the information available to it. The NPE is not a bug! It’s not even really a “gotcha”. Still, the NullPointerException might look like a bug to novice user. (Indeed, Stef recently noticed someone describe it as a bug in a conference presentation.) So I’m asking myself how we can make this less surprising. There’s a range of options, including:
- add a better error message to the
NullPointerException, - throw an
AssertionExceptioninstead of aNullPointerException, or even, perhaps, - following the approach we use for JavaScript interop, require you to surround “lighthanded” code in a special construct that suppresses the “heavyhanded” typechecks,
dynamic Null { ... }or something.
I lean towards the first of these options, I suppose. Whatever we do, we need to document this better. Right now, the documentation is kinda hidden.
