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I remember tracking down the null silent message failure issue in the early 1990s on NextStep. Then again almost 2 decades later on the iPhone. Personally, I’m not a fan of silent failures.

IMHO, allowing for non-nullable variables is a huge improvement in language design. Adding boilerplate annotations is an ugly way to handle it. Optimize for the common case and make variables non-nullable by default.

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In my experience, forbidding null refs usually only results in getting null objects instead, such as empty strings or empty collections. Thats not bad, but might not solve such a silent error message, you'll still end up with an empty message in the end. In order to solve it proper, I'm thinking you'd might want to go further and have more expressive type constraints, like Ada subranges.

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