> reading https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35133241, the plan is to change that. I fear that, by the time they get around to that, lots of code will handle the cases null and Optional containing null differently, making that a breaking change
The post your link links to explains exactly how they intend to avoid this problem.
The way I read that is that it says they’ll introduce an “inline class” that’s used to implement the “reference class” Optional, not that it will be replaced by it.
IMO, that’s not solving the problem, but doing the best you can once you’ve decided to implement Optional as a reference class now and as a value class at some future time.
I think I would have waited for the proper implementation.
The post your link links to explains exactly how they intend to avoid this problem.