The programming language Dart is about to introduce sound null safety, which involves a bundle of language mechanisms associated with null as a typing property. This talk presents these mechanisms, including nullable types, late variables, type promotion, null shorting, and the handling of programs with both legacy and null safe libraries.

The discussion and AMA following this talk will be moderated by Joe Pamer and Erik Meijer. No recording will be available.

Erik Ernst is a member of the Dart language team at Google, maintaining the language specification. He has been an associate professor at Aarhus University. He has published research on virtual classes, establishing that they can be statically safe. He introduced family polymorphism, which is foundational for path dependent types, and he contributed to the introduction of generics in Java.