Scala's Option type is a big improvement in type safety over Java's null checking and NullPointerException's. Unfortunately when wrapping a value in Some there is a quite big overhead: creation of one additional object containing a reference to the value. It would be more efficient if we could represent Some as the unboxed pointer value and encode None as the null value, but at the same time preserving the type safety as we get with the Option type (for example Kotlin uses this approach in it's builtin support for nullable types). Well, we can do exactly this with value classes introduced in Scala 2.10:
final case class Option[+T](value: Any = null) extends AnyVal with Product with Serializable {
private def unsafeGet = value.asInstanceOf[T]
def isEmpty: Boolean = value == null
...
}
The reason that the class parameter is of type Any and not T is that it's not allowed to create a value of type Nothing. We still want to be able to create a None value of type Option[Nothing] though so we delay the unsafe cast to T (using the unsafeGet method) until the value is actually required and we've checked that it's actually there using the isEmpty method.
The code is on GitHub if someone wants to try it out. It's pretty much a dropin replacement for the standard Scala Option type.
Memory Usage Comparisons
Below is a comparison in memory usage between the scala.Option type and the unboxed AnyVal option type when allocating 1M objects each containing one optional value:
scala.Some: 33 MB scala.None: 19 MB scala.Some : Any: 34 MB scala.None : Any: 19 MB AnyVal Some: 19 MB AnyVal None: 19 MB AnyVal Some : Any: 34 MB AnyVal None : Any: 34 MB
As one would expect, memory usage for Some is almost halved and for None the memory usage is unchanged. The downside of using the AnyVal option is that it uses more memory when a None is upcasted to a super type because then the compiler will box the reference. I would assume this is a quite rare case though.
