I did not check, but judging from the code that is what will happen. See how OnTheFlyNestedSorted (renamed to DocValuesJoin after HSEARCH-3797 In Progress ) accepts primitive values for the missingValue parameter, while the caller hold an object value which should be null when the user didn't call .missingLast()/.missingAs()/.missingFirst().

We should add a test and fix this.

Ideally we should make OnTheFlyNestedSorted/DocValuesJoin accept a null missingValue and return false from advanceExact when a value is missing. This would allow using the same class for projections on docvalues.

If it's too hard to implement, another solution (perhaps easier) would be to just set a default missingValue to 0.0f, for example. That's how org.apache.lucene.search.FieldComparator.FloatComparator#getValueForDoc behaves when a value is not found in a document anyway.

I'm not sure setting a default "missing value behavior" would be the solution: maybe Lucene has a built-in