Github user StephanEwen commented on the issue:
https://github.com/apache/flink/pull/2723
Null is not specific to any type - everything can be null.
The approach you suggest leads to a bad design. Many types just cannot
simply encode null themselves without overhead and allowing this void
optimizations for primitive types and tighter loops without null checks. Having
a common null encoding in the containing type (tuples, etc) is the more
efficient approach, one can encode a lot of null information in a tuple-wide
bit vector for example.
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