Hi all,

It has been a while since I last announced the plan to adopt smart pointers using clang static analyzer:

Here are some updates.

2. We also have a new kind of smart pointers: CheckedRef / CheckedPtr. These behave like Ref and RefPtr in that they increment & decrement a counter in an object but unlike them don’t extend the lifetime of the object. Instead, the destructor of the base object release asserts that there are no live CheckedRef / CheckedPtr left.

I added a new section in the guide describing when to use each smart pointer type:

3. I wanted to describe what applying these smart pointer rules mean. A lot of code changes needed for this work involves creating Ref / RefPtr / CheckedRef / CheckedPtr in stack:

One subtle thing is that even when a member variable is already Ref / RefPtr / CheckedRef / CheckedPtr, we must create another one in stack as seen here:

This is because these member variables can be cleared during the course of invoking a non-trivial function; or put it another way, it’s not immediately obvious from the code inspection that the object pointed to stays alive over the course of a non-trivial function call.

- R. Niwa