The C++11 standard defines a new dedicated null-pointer symbol, "nullptr". It
provides better type-safety than existing null-pointer definitions, because it
doesn't allow implicit conversion to numeric types. In
<https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=626472> I defined "nullptr" to
mean 0L/0LL (like current nsnull) where unsupported, then redefined "nsnull" to
mean "nullptr". This caught a bunch of places where people were using nsnull
to mean crazy things like NS_OK or other things that happened to equal 0.
The next step is to s/nsnull/nullptr/ in the codebase, and get rid of nsnull.
There's no reason for us to use our own identifier when there's a standard one.
This will be of comparable scale to the PRBool elimination of last year --
around 20,000 lines changed instead of 30,000. This will of course
insta-bitrot any patches that people have that mention "nsnull" anywhere, but a
shell script will be provided to auto-fix them, as with the PRBool switch
(something like "sed -i s/\bnsnull\b/nullptr/ .hg/patches{,-*}/*" should do it).
This message is of general interest because after the switch, "nsnull" will no
longer work, and patch queues will have to be updated. Also, anyone who
maintains a branch will want to figure out how to avoid merge pain.
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