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What are some things in the class library you wish more people knew about or used? (docs.oracle.com)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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I'm curious if there are things in the standard class library that you find useful but not widely used.

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I've waffled on it. Currently my opinion is to use whatever nullable annotation the project uses (if any, otherwise JetBrains's). Essentially, I'm not sure if the official recommendation to avoid Optional for uses other than return types has reasoning I'm missing.

I do use it like this though and lament that we don't have an Elvis operator (?:)

Optional.ofNullable(thingThatMightBeNull).map(e -> e.someMethod()).orElse(null);

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Instead of wrapping it in an optional you can do Objects.requireNonNullElse(value, defaultValue)

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Optional has more syntactic sugar for more complex scenarios / functional call chaining that prevents repetitive if checks

Optional.ofNullable(myObj)
  .map(MyClass::getProperty)
  .map(MyOtherClass::getAnotherProperty)
  .filter(obj -> somePredicate(obj))
  .orElse(null)

This is completely null safe, the function calls are only made if the object is not null