John Du Hart <compwhizii <at> gmail.com> writes: > It's just another style I've encountered on other projects and I > personally like.
The syntax itself is fine, but at Wikia we have found (after a recent post mortem) that out of 23 "Fatal Error" code defects found in production, 7 of them were due to method calls on null object references. If any method in that chain returns null then the request fails. It most cases core MediaWiki objects do return a valid stub object of some kind, but not all of them do (and in some cases they return null. intermittently so the code works "most of the time", which is in many ways the worse scenario). Introducing a pattern like this in a code base this large is therefore problematic. The "clean looking code" benefit is perhaps outweighed by the fact that you need to add extra "if" conditions or try/catch blocks everywhere to handle local null object exceptions. In our case, we are trying to ensure during code reviews that we just check for null objects in all "if" conditions, which does also lead to more highly nested and less readable code. Everything is a tradeoff, but IMHO you do need to check for null in chains like that, which means you can't really get away with it (at least not for long). _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
