Go's default for string is empty and not null. Scala elides to the default value, but for strings, it would be more helpful to elide to the empty string. There's only upside.

Probably folks don't use elidable enough for this to be a major issue.

Certainly the compiler has an issue where debug strings are expensive to compute. How handy if you could elide them and still have nothing crash with NPE.

This suggestion came from the SO question linked to ticket #9207.