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> Likewise, I think that in Scala and Swift, null is only present for compatibility purposes, and idiomatic code does not use them. I'm not sure about F#.

I believe though that with the exception of Swift, null can infect these language's quite easily via the FFI, and the guarantees aren't as strong. I haven't used them much though, so I could be wrong.

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Yeah, I guess it depends on how often you use the FFI, and I'm not familiar enough with these languages in practice to know how often that comes up. Part of the point of each of these is that they can utilize an existing ecosystem in which null is common (Java/JVM for Scala, C#/CLR for F#, Objective-C/Cocoa for Swift).

I know that in practice in Rust, the general approach is to write safe wrapper around any C libraries you're using, so the use of nullable pointers is generally confined to those wrappers.

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