Nullable reference types with generic return type

Question

I\'m playing around a bit with the new C# 8 nullable reference types feature, and while refactoring my code I came upon this (simplified) method:

public T Get         


        

Answer 1

I think default! is the best you can do at this point.

The reason why public T? Get(string key) doesn't work is because nullable reference types are very different from nullable value types.

Nullable reference types is purely a compile time thing. The little question marks and exclamation marks are only used by the compiler to check for possible nulls. To the eyes of the runtime, string? and string are exactly the same.

Nullable value types on the other hand, is syntactic sugar for Nullable. When the compiler compiles your method, it needs to decide the return type of your method. If T is a reference type, your method would have return type T. If T is a value type, your method would have a return type of Nullable. But the compiler don't know how to handle it when T can be both. It certainly can't say "the return type is T if T is a reference type, and it is Nullable if T is a reference type." because the CLR wouldn't understand that. A method is supposed to only have one return type.

In other words, by saying that you want to return T? is like saying you want to return T when T is a reference type, and return Nullable when T is a value type. That doesn't sound like a valid return type for a method, does it?

As a really bad workaround, you could declare two methods with different names - one has T constrained to value types, and the other has T constrained to reference types:

public T? Get(string key) where T : class
{
    var wrapper = cacheService.Get(key);
    return wrapper.HasValue ? Deserialize(wrapper) : null;
}

public T? GetStruct(string key) where T : struct
{
    var wrapper = cacheService.Get(key);
    return wrapper.HasValue ? (T?)Deserialize(wrapper) : null;
}