I'm wondering if the Lucene community would be supportive of adopting common annotations, such a @Nullable, to enable better static analysis for downstream projects and within Lucene as well. Lucene makes extensive use of nulls for performance reasons, but using this code can be prone to user error.
Since most tools nowadays (e.g. Errorprone, NullAway, Intellij) will recognize annotations based on their simple name, rather than the fully qualified class name, it's possible to support this analysis without introducing any third party dependencies. I would like to propose annotating Lucene methods with "org.apache.lucene.annotations.Nullable" where applicable, and perhaps similar for @MustBeClosed.
