We have to use pointers for various reasons. Legacy interfaces use them all over the place, so we continue to do so, and they don't really work like pointers at

We have to use pointers for various reasons. Legacy interfaces use them all over the place, so we continue to do so, and they don't really work like pointers at all, so they're horribly inconsistent. Boilerplate things like conditional & partial initialization require jumping through hoops to get working for references. We also have lots of shared & cached objects, so everything needs to be validated anyway, you don't really gain much by knowing a pointer isn't null.