[Manishearth]

The difference is that Optional itself can be null, and in Java everything can be null.

[peeters]

It can be, and it's annoying, but that's still a step forward. It's trivial for a good static checker to treat all Optional references as if they were annotated with your favorite @Nonnull annotation.

[krisdol]

But in Java you'd never use a library that calls System.exit when it reaches an unexpected null

[Manishearth]

See my other comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10452408

In Rust you'd rarely write a library that panics on unexpected nulls.

(Also, panic != abort, yada yada)