null at run time.
Unlike org.eclipse.jdt.annotation.Nullable, this has run-time
retention, allowing the annotation to be recognized by
Guice. Unlike
javax.annotation.Nullable, this does not involve importing new classes
to a standard (Java EE) package, so it can be deployed in an OSGi container
without running into
split-package
problems.
You can use this annotation to qualify a type in a method signature or local
variable declaration. The entity whose type has this annotation is allowed to
hold the value null at run time. This allows annotation based null
analysis to infer that
null value to the entity is legal.
NullPointerException.
To avoid a dependency on Java 8, this annotation does not use
@Target TYPE_USE. That may change when JGit starts
requiring Java 8.
Warning
Please do not use this annotation on arrays. Different
annotation processors treat @Nullable Object[] differently: some
treat it as an array of nullable objects, for consistency with versions of
Nullable defined with @Target TYPE_USE, while others
treat it as a nullable array of objects. JGit therefore avoids using this
annotation on arrays altogether.