3 ms·

It's wildly useful to have interface contracts that can be verified by the compiler. In my experience this benefit of using pointers (vs references) only when t

• quotemstr 5y ago
  > In my experience this benefit of using pointers (vs references) only when the argument is optional way outweighs the drawback of not seeing an '&' at the call site. Maybe so. Reasonable people differ on this subject. My point is different: it's just not true that if a parameter is a pointer, then as a general requirement you have to check at runtime whether that pointer is non-NULL. It drives me nuts when I see these checks sprinkled throughout a codebase.
  • nemetroid 5y ago
    > My point is different: it's just not true that if a parameter is a pointer, then as a general requirement you have to check at runtime whether that pointer is non-NULL. It drives me nuts when I see these checks sprinkled throughout a codebase. My point is that if you only ever use pointer arguments to indicate that the argument is optional, then the checks are required.
  • stevenhuang 5y ago
    But it is a reasonable rule, hence it being a general requirement in a lot of places. More nuanced, it's more important to have these null checks on a library's public interfaces than a library's private interfaces. Private interfaces can do with asserts for null check.
    • quotemstr 5y ago
      > it's more important to have these null checks on a library's public interfaces No it isn't.
      • stevenhuang 5y ago
        Library authors and users would disagree with you.