oh I agree, and understand. You lose compile time enforced type safety against nulls when you approximate it, and I do think it is the right approach to use opt

oh I agree, and understand. You lose compile time enforced type safety against nulls when you approximate it, and I do think it is the right approach to use option types instead of null, and that more languages should do this. But it is just one parameter of a thousand affecting how easy it is to write good code, it sometimes has runtime costs.