If you use try/catch, you can either swallow the exception, deal with it, or rethrow. But sometimes you don't know how to handle or rethrow an exception. Maybe

If you use try/catch, you can either swallow the exception, deal with it, or rethrow. But sometimes you don't know how to handle or rethrow an exception. Maybe you don't even know that the library code you are calling is going to throw! A "neverthrows" block would not compile if there is anything inside that can throw (even a runtime exception). Its a way of drawing a line. A library author could use it to make sure no unexpected exceptions can bubble up. And yeah, if you get NPEs at random you are making a mistake. If I could just choose to not make mistakes, I would :-D. But until then, I'd prefer the compiler to check my work. (And catching them is not an option. What do you do then? Terminate the program? Ignore them? They need to be found at compile time, not at runtime.)