Current sentiment on Nullable.get

[Atila Neves]

On Tuesday, 11 December 2018 at 22:32:45 UTC, Jonathan M Davis 
wrote:
> On Tuesday, December 11, 2018 2:48:36 PM MST aliak via 
> Digitalmars-d wrote:
>> [...]
>
> Ultimately, allocation is the main difference here. Nullable 
> provides a way to emulate the behavior of a pointer with 
> regards to nullability without having to allocate on the heap. 
> An Optional or Maybe type is ultimately the same thing, just 
> with a different name. If it weren't for the issue of heap 
> allocation, it could easily argued that pointers negate the 
> need for any kind of Nullable/Optional/Maybe type, because they 
> provide that functionality. And they don't even cause memory 
> safety issues if you're not doing pointer arithmetic.

There's another fundamental difference with regards to pointers: 
there's no equivalent to `null`, which is this weird special 
value that is compatible with all pointer types.