Object Lifetime and Null Handles: Concept Explained

Concept

In short: Most null-handle crashes are ownership bugs: one branch skips construction while downstream code assumes construction always happened.

In one regression, a sequence builder created packets in 99% of seeds, then skipped construction in a timeout-recovery branch. The fatal showed up much later in a scoreboard callback, so the stack trace blamed the wrong component for hours.\n\nThe reliable fix was to define a single owner responsible for object creation and to assert non-null at handoff boundaries. Debug gets easier when every component either guarantees construction or explicitly treats null as part of the contract.

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