[webkit-dev] Naming singletons

[Ryosuke Niwa]

Hi all,

TL; DR: Add “Singleton” suffix to a function which returns a singleton to help aid WebKit static analyzers.

It’s fairly common for some classes to provide a static member function which returns a singleton. Such a function typically holds NeverDestroyed instance of an object and it’s safe to call any mutating member functions on it without locally storing Ref/RefPtr/CheckedRef/CheckedPtr.

Unfortunately, this poses a challenge for WebKit static analyzers which enforces safe smart pointer usage because the static analyzers can’t differentiate a static function which returns a singleton and a static function which returns a non-singleton instance of an object. For this reason, I suggest we start suffixing the name of each function which returns a singleton with “Singleton” e.g. IOSurfacePool::sharedPoolSingleton instead of IOSurfacePool::sharedPool. This will help aid static analyzers to identify a function which returns a singleton and not generate superfluous warnings for it.

- R. Niwa

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