Proposal to rename Null->Nullable, Nullable->Nullish

[DZakh]

I'm perfectly fine with naming we had all this time, but in a new era AI writes most of the code, and I think having a naming parity with JavaScript is more important. For example, this proposal was inspired by the Claude Code session where it was doing bindings for napi-rs and it used Nullable.t type thinking that its value is null, like in TS. I had to correct it myself, saying that it should use a more correct Null.t type.

Additionally, Null.t by itself is already confusing, making me subconsciously think that it's just a null value type.

Proposed migration plan

Since this is a very big breaking change and updating both modules at the same time will be an issue because it might silently change generated JavaScript code, I think we must approach it in multiple major releases. And because of this, start earlier. Here is the proposed plan.

1. In next v12 minor we deprecate Nullable module in favor of the new Nullish module
2. In v13 we we remove Nullable in favor of Nullish
3. In v14 we deprecate Null module in favor of Nullable - I think there should be a whole major version without Nullable module to prevent issues during migration

To accelerate the change, we can add a feature flag in ReScript config which would allow us to explicitly force the migration: Null->Nullable, Nullable->Nullish

Let me know what you think.

[tx46]

i agree with the essence of what you're saying, i just think it's a difficult maneuver to perform. also i don't like the idea of adding feature flags, because we'll end up with variants of the lang/stdlib which makes things very confusing.

[DZakh]

I think Nullable is the most confusing. So if we rename only Nullable->Nullish without Null->Nullable, we'll eliminate the confusion for agents, and won't introduce a meaning change.