Null safety is a key feature of Kotlin designed to eliminate the risk of null pointer exceptions, a common source of bugs in many programming languages. Kotlin achieves null safety through a combination of nullable and non-nullable types, along with explicit null handling mechanisms.
In Kotlin, all types are non-nullable by default, meaning they cannot hold a null value unless explicitly specified. To allow a variable to hold null, you must declare its type as nullable by appending ? to the type name.
For example:
kotlin val nullableString: String? = null
In this example, nullableString is explicitly declared as nullable, allowing it to hold either a string value or null.
Kotlin provides several null-safe operators and constructs to safely handle nullable values, including the safe call operator (?.), the Elvis operator (?:), and the safe cast operator (as?).
