Use the Option Wrapper

With C# 8.0 nullable references, we can tell when an object reference might be null. We have type hints for that. The statement Movie movie is different from the statement Movie? movie.

We only have nullable references available if we’re using recent C# versions with .NET Core 3.0 and upward. But, if we’re using older versions, we can use an alternative from functional languages: the Option type.

The Option type

Functional languages, like F# or Haskell, use a different approach for null and optional values. Instead of null, they use an Option or Maybe type.

With the Option type, we have a box that might have a value. It’s the same concept of nullable primitive types. We briefly mentioned them before. Let’s write an example using nullable int to see how it relates to the Option type.