Earlier quoted context omitted.
I really like the Kotlin approach, where they just embraced null being a fact of life on the JVM/JS and instead integrated nullability into the type-system [1]. C# and Typescript do something similar. So then you get the best of both world, the safety of Optional without the boxing overhead. [1] https://kotlinlang.org/docs/null-safety.html
This really sounds like the way to go, although of course it is too late for Java. Optional feels awkward, and there's no more safety than we already have since the JVM null-checks anyway. if( arg.isPresent() ) ... vs if( arg != null ) ... How is this better?
The main advantage is that Optional is inconvenient and forces you to consider the null case. It's easy to forget that values can be null and assume they're not, e.g. auto-unboxing
Long getSomeValue();
int max = Math.max(0, obj.getSomeValue());
Optional getSomeValue();
... obj.getSomeValue().get());