I think passing non-nullable things by reference is good, but I think we should keep it consistent for a given type. So, for example, we shouldn't have some callsites that take an nsPresContext* and others that take an nsPresContext& (unless we have a rare case of a nullable presContext arg, in which case |nsPresContext* aPresContextOrNull| would suffice).
Basically, I think consistency is important, but maintaining that consistency per-type rather than system-wide seems like a reasonable compromise. Curious as to what others think here. bholley On Tue, May 9, 2017 at 11:58 AM, Emilio Cobos Álvarez <emi...@crisal.io> wrote: > Hi dev-platform@, > > So, yesterday was working on a bug (bug 1362991, if you're curious) when > I decided to do some spring cleanup and pass some non-optional argument > as a reference instead of as a pointer. > > I got the cleanup patch rejected, because it went against the prevailing > style of the codebase, and I was told that moving to references required > a discussion in dev-platform, resulting in something more explicit in > the style guide. > > So, I'll revert that patch for now, but I'm sending this mail to > kickstart that discussion :) > > TL;DR: I think references are useful. We have encoded nullability of > arguments and return values implicitly or explicitly in different ways: > assertions inside of the function, naming conventions... > > I think references help to encode that a bit more in the type system, > and help reasoning about the code without having to look at the > implementation of the function you're calling into, or without having to > rely on the callers to know that you expect a non-null argument. > > Personally, I don't think that the fact that they're not used as much as > they could/should is a good argument to prevent their usage, but I don't > know what's the general opinion on that. > > Thanks for reading. > > -- Emilio > > _______________________________________________ > dev-platform mailing list > dev-platform@lists.mozilla.org > https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-platform > > _______________________________________________ dev-platform mailing list dev-platform@lists.mozilla.org https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-platform
