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

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.