[webkit-dev] Stop Using Raw Pointers & References in New Code

[Darin Adler]

I don’t think I can notice these patterns. I would be able to program this way if I had an analysis tool, but otherwise this simply seems too complicated. I can’t see the types of intermediate values to know if they are CheckedPtr or RefPtr or raw pointers or whatever. A variation on the first line in Element::clientLeft is a good example:

	document()->updateLayoutIgnorePendingStylesheets();

That looks perfectly good to me, nothing makes me think “the result of document is an unsafe reference to a heap-allocated object and only trivial functions can be called on that”; I should not need to be an expert on each function to be able to tell if code is correct or not. How can we choose a programming style where something simple like that is subtly wrong and dangerous and requires reviewers to look out for it?

I understand that if properly supported by a tool we could adapt to this and write code a whole new way. Moving to this style without a tool would almost literally require me to stop working on WebKit because I couldn’t correctly write or review even a short function.

— Darin