Today, I would like to discuss an essential Java topic – the usage of Optional class — and compare it with an alternative from the Vavr library. Optional was initially introduced in Java 8 and defined as “a container object which may or may not contain a non-null value.”
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Developers utilize Optionals in order to avoid null checking in places when code execution leads to "not a result" but also to a null value, and it can, in this regard, result in a NullPointerException. In such cases, Optional offers us some fancy functionality, but not all of it was introduced in the 8th release, some features require Java 11. Another way to handle these issues is with Vavr’s Option class.