[lomnakkus]

Kind of. It's a sort of "bad karma" approach: There's no compiler support per se, but it's generally frowned upon to use "null" in native Scala code. Usually Scala APIs will use Option[T] to signify that something is optional and just assume that you don't pass a Some(null) -- I can't recall off-hand whether the latter will actually throw an NPE.

(Personally, I don't think that it's nearly sufficient, but as Paul Phillips would say "INTEROPERABILITY with Java!". Us Scala users suffer greatly for that nebulous goal.)