IH-640: Eliminate unnecessary usage of List.length to check for empty lists

[last-genius]

Instead of traversing the entire list just to check if the first element is present, do that directly.

OCaml 5.1 has List.is_empty, here a simple lst = [] is used along with match statements.

Adds a quality gate to check that we don't add trivially unnecessary cases like this anymore.

[coveralls]

coverage: 44.887%. remained the same
when pulling 27fd041 on last-genius:private/asultanov/empty-length-checking
into 2008661 on xapi-project:master.

[psafont]

Thanks for this, the gate is especially appreciated. Unfortunately some changes are needed

[coveralls]

coverage: 44.887%. remained the same
when pulling b57ff2c on last-genius:private/asultanov/empty-length-checking
into 2008661 on xapi-project:master.

[lindig]

I like this spring cleaning!

[last-genius]

These changes passed the BST+BVT test suites, undrafting.

[contificate]

Looks good to me.

Reading through the diff highlights a few smaller changes worth doing within the vicinity of these changes (anti-patterns seem to clump together and cleanups tend to cascade) at a later date. Perhaps we ought to have an internal page specifically tracking these kinds of incremental cleanups?

[lindig]

I would avoid creating an internal page and rather create a ticket and use labels to find them again. Or start with a single ticket to collect them and from there create sub-tickets once they are worked on.

[contificate]

I would avoid creating an internal page and rather create a ticket and use labels to find them again. Or start with a single ticket to collect them and from there create sub-tickets once they are worked on.

Ah, yeah.. probably a better idea than throwing them into the Confluence abyss.

[psafont]

Please squash the commits before merging

[coveralls]

coverage: 44.887%. remained the same
when pulling 845ffdd on last-genius:private/asultanov/empty-length-checking
into dd9ba19 on xapi-project:master.