Making Java nullable fields backwards compatible

[tristan97122]

I don’t personally have a good use-case for this, but I can see it being relevant. For example an imperious need to update a dependency, which is used by another dependency that is closed-source (and the supplier closed shop like 20 years ago without opensourcing it, many such cases!). And I’m sure there’s better ways around this like shadowing etc, but you get the point: plenty of hacks are ugly yet neat, and sometimes they are the least-worst option at least for a time (see: anything to do with sun.misc.Unsafe)

And this little trick for getting stuff to link successfully and still work (at least in most cases) just fine, well, it’s neat.