Null Safety with Randal Schwartz

Flutter 101 Podcast

My guest today is Randal Schwartz. He is a Google Developer Expert on Flutter and Dart. He is also very active in the Perl community and he wrote multiple books on Perl, he was the host of FLOSS weekly, a podcast about Free Libre Open Source Software.

In this episode, we focused on null safety with Dart. Dart 2.12 added support for null safety. When you opt into null safety, types in your code are non-nullable by default. This means that variables can't contain null unless you say they can. With null safety, your runtime null-dereference errors turn into edit-time analysis errors.

We also talked about migrating our existing code to null safety, and the migrations tools that can help us make the migration process as seamless as possible.

Resources

• Dart documentation
  • Sound null safety
  • Migrating to null safety
  • Understanding null safety by Bob Nystrom
  • Unsound null safety
  • Null safety FAQ
  • Dart language evolution
• FLOSS Weekly
  • Episode 245: Dart (Seth Ladd)
  • Episode 511: Flutter 1.0 (Eric Seidel)
• Flutter Community Humpday Q&A/AMA
  • From the Flutter Team, it's Fitz!
  • Null Safety and Cloud Functions with Kevin Moore
• Dart "mockito" null safety
• flutter.dev/community

Guest: Randal Schwartz

• Twitter @RandalSchwartz
• GitHub @RandalSchwartz
• LinkedIn linkedin.com/in/randalschwartz
• Web stonehenge.com
• YouTube
• Google Developer Expert Profile
• Wikipedia

Host: Vince Varga

• Twitter @vincevargadev
• GitHub @vincevargadev
• LinkedIn @vincevargadev
• Web vincevarga.dev