Basically, all I’m trying to do is to
prevent the program from crashing when
some_cpp_function() is called with
NULL.
It is not possible to call the function with NULL. One of the purpose of having the reference, it will point to some object always as you have to initialize it when defining it. Do not think reference as a fancy pointer, think of it as an alias name for the object itself. Then this type of confusion will not arise.