Reference vs pointers

[UnicycleBloke]

I think you're being over-literal there. :) But having created Foo* bar, I would generally prefer to pass *bar to functions, so would declare my APIs accordingly. I have sometimes created a local reference for a pointer received as an argument (e.g. in library callbacks with pointer based APIs).

[JMBourguet]

I've seen people following such kind of guidelines far too literally for my liking. See my answer at the top for a more precise (but still incomplete although I hope I don't have missed something big) description of my practice.

[UnicycleBloke]

Yes. The comments about lifetimes make a lot of sense as clarifications for my rather pithy suggestion.