Dart has had some null-aware operators for awhile (https://news.dartlang.org/2015/08/dart-112-released-with-nul...) otherwise you'll need to explicitly do null checks. It's certainly not perfect, but it's still "good enough" to make handling null relatively concise. In my experience code review can do a good enough job at promoting good practices around null handling that non-nullable types are really just a "nice to have".