This patch replaces the former prominent use of pointers by references
wherever feasible. This has the following benefits:
* The contract between caller and callee becomes more obvious. When
passing a reference, the contract says that the argument cannot be
a null pointer. The caller is responsible to ensure that. Therefore,
the use of reference eliminates the need to add defensive null-pointer
checks at the callee site, which sometimes merely exist to be on the
safe side. The bottom line is that the code becomes easier to follow.
* Reference members must be initialized via an object initializer,
which promotes a programming style that avoids intermediate object-
construction states. Within core, there are still a few pointers
as member variables left though. E.g., caused by the late association
of 'Platform_thread' objects with their 'Platform_pd' objects.
* If no pointers are present as member variables, we don't need to
manually provide declarations of a private copy constructor and
an assignment operator to avoid -Weffc++ errors "class ... has
pointer data members [-Werror=effc++]".
This patch also changes a few system bindings on NOVA and Fiasco.OC,
e.g., the return value of the global 'cap_map' accessor has become a
reference. Hence, the patch touches a few places outside of core.
Fixes#3135
Ehmry -
Stefan Kalkowski
Norman Feske