MEM: Make port proxies use references rather than pointers

This patch is adding a clearer design intent to all objects that would
not be complete without a port proxy by making the proxies members
rathen than dynamically allocated. In essence, if NULL would not be a
valid value for the proxy, then we avoid using a pointer to make this
clear.

The same approach is used for the methods using these proxies, such as
loadSections, that now use references rather than pointers to better
reflect the fact that NULL would not be an acceptable value (in fact
the code would break and that is how this patch started out).

Overall the concept of "using a reference to express unconditional
composition where a NULL pointer is never valid" could be done on a
much broader scale throughout the code base, but for now it is only
done in the locations affected by the proxies.

1 files changed, 2 insertions, 2 deletions

diff --git a/src/base/loader/object_file.hh b/src/base/loader/object_file.hh
index ce58a2c4f..2ec41bf12 100644
--- a/src/base/loader/object_file.hh
+++ b/src/base/loader/object_file.hh
@@ -83,7 +83,7 @@ class ObjectFile
 
     void close();
 
-    virtual bool loadSections(PortProxy *memProxy, Addr addrMask =
+    virtual bool loadSections(PortProxy& memProxy, Addr addrMask =
             std::numeric_limits<Addr>::max());
     virtual bool loadGlobalSymbols(SymbolTable *symtab, Addr addrMask =
             std::numeric_limits<Addr>::max()) = 0;
@@ -111,7 +111,7 @@ class ObjectFile
     Section data;
     Section bss;
 
-    bool loadSection(Section *sec, PortProxy* memProxy, Addr addrMask);
+    bool loadSection(Section *sec, PortProxy& memProxy, Addr addrMask);
     void setGlobalPointer(Addr global_ptr) { globalPtr = global_ptr; }
 
   public: