1008348 - Make mRefCnt private instead of protected

Status: NEW

(Core :: XPCOM, defect)

Description

[Andrew McCreight [:mccr8]]

I don't see any good reason why a child class should be accessing mRefCnt directly in most cases.  Doing this will let us catch when somebody does NS_IMPL_ISUPPORTS() when they should be using NS_IMPL_ISUPPORTS_INHERITED().  It seems to mostly work, aside from a bunch of places that want to print out the refcount.  It does produce a monstrous amount of error spew when you get it wrong, though.

Comment 1

[Olli Pettay [:smaug][[e-mail]]]

In some cases we want to check whether object is purple. But I guess the base class can then just
expose some helper methods.

Comment 2

[Andrew McCreight [:mccr8]]

That wasn't actually a problem.

Comment 3

[Andrew McCreight [:mccr8]]

This is another thing you might be interested in looking into, bjacob.  I have a WIP around somewhere.  There are some classes that access the refcount directly, some to reimplement AddRef()/Release(), some to just print out the ref count.  So you'd probably need some kind of escape hatch.