Eclipse's automated code clean-up tool did most of the heavy lifting
here: it specifically has a clean-up option for converting functional
interfaces to lambdas. I merely had to revert the automated changes
for a single enumeration class for which it produced invalid results,
and for a few test inputs that apparently aren't set up to be compiled
with Java 8.
We already have plenty of examples of Serializable classes with this
field, and the vast majority of those fields have generated IDs rather
than "1L". From this I infer that using proper serialVersionUID
fields is considered appropriate WALA coding style.
In general, my approach was to try to eliminate each unused parameter
using Eclipse's "Change Method Signature" refactoring. That did not
always succeed: a parameter may be unused in some base class method,
but then be used in subclass's override of that method. In cases
where refactoring to eliminate a parameter failed, I instead annotated
the parameter with '@SuppressWarnings("unused")' to silence the
warning.
Note: this group of changes creates a significant risk of
incompatibility for third-party WALA code. Some removed parameters
change externally-visible APIs. Furthermore, these changes do not
necessarily lead to Java compilation errors. For example, suppose
third-party code subclasses a WALA class or interface, overrides a
method, but does not annotate that method as @Override. Removing a
parameter means that the third-party method no longer overrides. This
can quietly change code behavior without compile-time errors or
warnings. This is exactly why one should use @Override wherever
possible, but we cannot guarantee that third-party WALA users have
done that.
Unnecessary "throws" declarations tend to cascade. If foo() calls
bar() and bar() falsely declares that it might throw IOException, that
often leads a programmer to declare that foo() might throw IOException
as well. Fixing the bar() throws declaration then reveals that we can
fix the foo() throws declaration too. By the time we reach a fixed
point with cleaning these up, we have removed roughly 320 unnecessary
throws declarations.
In a few cases, this cleanup even lets us remove entire "try
... catch" statements where the only thing being caught was an
exception that we now statically know cannot be thrown. Nice!
In Eclipse project configurations, upgrade any future such shenanigans
from warnings to errors. Now that we've fixed this, we don't want it
coming back again.
There is a potential drawback to this change. Conceivably some public
WALA API entry point might have declared that it could throw some
exception merely to reserve the *option* of throwing that exception in
third-party code that subclasses and overrides the API entry point in
question. I have no idea whether this is a significant concern in
practice, though.
I have *not* upgraded this problem to be treated as an error in the
future. Unfortunately Eclipse uses a single configuration setting for
both unnecessary semicolons and also for empty control-flow statements
like `while (p) ;`. I'm not convinced that it's worth rewriting all
instances of the latter into `while (p) { }`. So this is just going
to stay as a warning for now.
The fix is to add "static" where appropriate, of course. I've also
simplified calls to such methods to reflect the fact that they no
longer need a specific object to call the method on.
In projects that contain test inputs, I've left the non-static
declarations unchanged, and instead downgraded the warning to be
ignored. In all other projects, this warning has been upgraded to an
error.
In all of these cases, the code used to initialize the unused local
seems nontrivial to me. I think this can all be removed without
erasing any needed side effects, but the code might still become
useful to someone in the future. So I'm not really removing the code
entirely, but merely commenting it out.
This fixes 49 Eclipse code style warnings. I'm not sure why these
were overlooked in my previous sweep of missing-@Override warnings.
Ah well; got 'em this time around.
In the cases addressed here, the caught exception was being "handled"
by throwing some new exception. Instead of discarding the old
exception, pass it to the new exception's constructor to indicate the
original cause of the newly-created exception. This practice, called
"exception chaining", can often be useful in debugging.
All of these involve conditionals that check some static, final debug
flag or debug level. The code will indeed be dead if WALA is built
with those debug facilities turned off. But we still want the code
present in case someone needs to turn some aspect of debugging on for
a while.
Most of the invalid HTML arose from bare "<" and ">" characters.
These should be escaped as "<" and ">" when not intended to
introduce HTML tags. When you have many such characters close
together, "{@literal ...}" is a nice, readable alternative that
automatically escapes its contents. If the text in question is
intended to be a code fragment, then "{@code ...}" is appropriate:
this is essentially equivalent to "<code>{@literal ...}</code>".
There were a few other HTML violations too, but none common enough to
be worth detailing here.
Julian Dolby
Ben Liblit
Raffi Khatchadourian
Julian Dolby