BREAKING: Nullability Changes

[lauzadis]

An upcoming release of the AWS SDK for Kotlin modifies the nullability of many generated types.

Release date

This feature will ship with the v0.33.0-beta release planned for 10/26/2023.

What's changing

The code generation for smithy-kotlin was updated to handle Smithy IDL 2.0 member optionality.
This allows members marked with @required or @default to be treated as non-nullable T instead of T? (with some exceptions). This reduces needless usage of the safe call operator (?.), elvis operator (?:), and not-null assertion operator (!!) in many cases.

How to migrate

This change is widespread. If your code fails to compile after updating check to see if the type changed to be nullable or non-nullable and handle accordingly.

Additional resources

If you have any questions concerning this change, please feel free to engage with us in this discussion. If you encounter a bug with these changes, please file an issue.