TBH, I don't think you should even have an instance of ``TemplateCompilationUnit`` if the Play template compiler didn't generate the Scala source. However, that's not how it works at the moment, which is why I'm returning ``null`` here. The semantic meaning of ``null` here is that the Play template compiler couldn't parse the original template file. The hope is that things will fail badly if ``getContents`` can be called when no Scala source file was generated by the Play template compiler. I thought about returning ``Array[Char].empty``, but I feel it would obfuscate the underlying issue.