CommandLineToolVersionLocator fails with an NPE on (broken visual studio) in Windows

[dweiss]

This has been reported to Apache Lucene mailing list - a stack trace like this one when firing up gradle on Windows:

Caused by: java.lang.NullPointerException
        at org.gradle.nativeplatform.toolchain.internal.msvcpp.version.CommandLineToolVersionLocator.parseJson(CommandLineToolVersionLocator.java:94)
        at org.gradle.nativeplatform.toolchain.internal.msvcpp.version.CommandLineToolVersionLocator.locateInstalls(CommandLineToolVersionLocator.java:60)

If you look at that stack trace (the bug is still present on master), gradle clearly just happily logs a missing output from vswhere and returns null:

https://github.com/gradle/gradle/blob/v7.3.3/subprojects/platform-native/src/main/java/org/gradle/nativeplatform/toolchain/internal/msvcpp/version/CommandLineToolVersionLocator.java#L86-L89

which then propagates up as NPE in parseJson:

https://github.com/gradle/gradle/blob/v7.3.3/subprojects/platform-native/src/main/java/org/gradle/nativeplatform/toolchain/internal/msvcpp/version/CommandLineToolVersionLocator.java#L59-L60

The returned null value should be guarded with an if in locateInstalls and ignored:

https://github.com/gradle/gradle/blob/v7.3.3/subprojects/platform-native/src/main/java/org/gradle/nativeplatform/toolchain/internal/msvcpp/version/CommandLineToolVersionLocator.java#L59-L60

[ghidra1]

This may be related to #20968