In Gen.visitLiteral, a null literal is treated as an array if the dimension of the expected array is 1. Moving forward, it would be nice to update the code in Gen so that either:

*) we always generate a cast from null to expected type (regardless of dimension)

*) we never generate a cast from null to XYZ (regardless of dimension of XYZ); this seems to be the way in which other compilers handle similar situations

If we go for the first solution, the patch for 7040104 can go away; if we go for the latter, the same patch has to be modified, so that the element type of 'null' is 'null' (so that you can perform multiple array selections).

The code in question is:

 if (types.dimensions(pt) > 1) {
                code.emitop2(checkcast, makeRef(tree.pos(), pt));
                result = items.makeStackItem(pt);
            } else {
                result = items.makeStackItem(tree.type);
            }