Java 8 adds this exact feature through extending annotation capability and adding hooks for pluggable type checkers, including a null propagation checker: http

Java 8 adds this exact feature through extending annotation capability and adding hooks for pluggable type checkers, including a null propagation checker: http://docs.oracle.com/javase/tutorial/java/annotations/type_annotations.html http://docs.oracle.com/javase/tutorial/java/annotations/type... and an Optional<T> class (references to which can still be null for maximum hilarity): http://download.java.net/jdk8/docs/api/java/util/Optional.html http://download.java.net/jdk8/docs/api/java/util/Optional.ht... I'm stoked. And disappointed the "elvis" operator didn't make it in. I hope some day Java breaks backwards compatibility and eliminates null entirely. Then again, that's already happened with the proliferation of other JVM languages. But that doesn't me at my day job, where we have a large legacy code base... which would need to be ported to a backwards-incompatible version of non-null Java anyway. Hm. Well, with Java 8 I can at least start to grow null-safe code within our codebase.