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.
Previously we had 227 such warnings. That large number suggests that
the WALA developers consider this to be an acceptable coding style.
If that's so, then it's better to hide these warnings rather than keep
them around as a perpetual distraction.
Previously we had 242 such warnings. That large number suggests that
the WALA developers consider this to be an acceptable coding style.
If that's so, then it's better to hide these warnings rather than keep
them around as a perpetual distraction.
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.
Along the way, I also converted many "for (;;)" loops into modern
"for (:)" loops. I didn't systematically look for all opportunities
to do this, though. I merely made this change where I was already
converting raw Iterator uses into modern Iterator<...> uses.
Better use of generics also allowed many casts to become statically
redundant. I have removed all such redundant casts.
Only three raw-types warnings remain after this batch of fixes. All
three involve raw uses of CallGraphBuilder. I've tried to fix these
too, but it quickly snowballs into a cascade of changes that may or
may not eventually reach a statically-type-save fixed point. I may
give these last few problem areas another go in the future. For now,
though, the hundreds of other fixes seem worth keeping even if there
are a few stragglers.
This commit may change some public APIs, but only by making weaker
type signatures stronger by replacing raw types with generic types.
For example, we may change something like "Set" into "Set<String>",
but we're not adding new arguments, changing any
underlying (post-generics-erasure) types, etc.
There are two such diagnostics: one for collection methods and one for
equals(). See
<https://www.eclipse.org/eclipse/news/4.7/jdt.php#unlikely-argument-types>
for more information about these two new diagnostics.
For each of these diagnostics, I've set the severity level to
"warning" in projects that have some instances of the suspicious code,
or to "error" in projects that have no instances of the suspicious
code.
These should mostly be things that we've already decided earlier that
we explicitly don't want to "fix" because they simply disagree with
the WALA project's coding style.
The additional diagnostics are ones that were previously being
ignored, but which we seem to have been ignoring by default rather
than as a conscious choice.
For diagnostics of which we currently have *zero* instances, treat
these as errors rather than merely warnings. The intent is to
permanently lock out future regressions of things we've completely
fixed. In the future, whenever we fix the last instance of a given
warning in a given Eclipse project, we should also promote that
diagnostic to an error to keep things clean into the future.
This fixes five Eclipse "Source folder '...' does not have the output
folder in corresponding output entry 'output..'" warnings in the
"Plug-in Development" category.
Previously some of these were accessing such fields through a subclass
of the declaring class. That creates an unnecessary extra inter-class
dependency lower in the type hierarchy than necessary.
Also, suppress this warning in an automated test input where the
indirect static accesses are explicitly intentional.
If a method is private, there's no risk that a subclass elsewhere
might be overriding it and depending on dynamic dispatch to choose the
right implementation. So all of these private methods can safely be
declared static without risk of regression in either WALA code or
unseen third-party code.
The "potentially" qualifier is here because these methods are visible
outside the WALA source tree. These methods may seem OK to be static
based on the code we have here, but we have no way of knowing whether
third-party code expected to be able to subclass and override. I'm
going to play it safe and assume that we want to allow that.
Note that we are still allowing Eclipse warnings about methods that
can *definitely* be declared static; a different configuration option
controls these. For private methods, final methods, and methods in
final classes, if the code seems static-safe based on what we have
here, then that's good enough: we don't need to worry about
third-party overrides.
In each of these cases, the constructor directly or indirectly has
side effects that we want to keep, even if the object itself is not
retained and used by eht code that invokes `new`.
Specifically, these are all warnings of the form "The
'javacProjectSettings' build entry should be set when there are project
specific compiler settings".
* Add missing type parameters to overrides of ModRef.makeModVisitor
* Add missing type parameters to overrides of ModRef.makeRefVisitor
This also required slightly generalizing the generic type signature of
the ModRef.makeRefVisitor return type. Instead of returning
"RefVisitor<T, ExtendedHeapModel>", we now return "RefVisitor<T, ?
extends ExtendedHeapModel>". We need that extra flexibility because
at least one override of this method returns a RefVisitor whose second
generic type parameter is a subclass of ExtendedHeapModel.
Specifically, we're turning off Eclipse warnings about missing version
constraints on required bundles ("Require-Bundle"), exported
packages ("Export-Package"), and imported packages ("Import-Package").
We're not turning these off absolutely everywhere, though: only in
packages where one or more such warnings were actually being reported.
So if a given package was already providing all version constraints
for, say, package imports, then we've kept that warning on in that
package.
Honestly I don't entirely understand the practical implications of
these warnings. However, there were 355 of them across many WALA
subprojects. I take this as evidence that the WALA developers do not
consider these version constraints to be important. Therefore, we may
as well stop warning about something we have no intention of fixing.
That being said, if we *do* want to fix some or all of these, I
welcome any advice on what those fixes should look like. I am rather
ignorant about all things OSGi.
Removing an unused field sometimes means removing constructor code
that used to initialize that field. Removing that initialization code
sometimes leaves whole constructor arguments unused. Removing those
unused arguments can leave us with unused code to compute those
arguments in constructors' callers, and so on. This commit tries to
clean all of this up, working backward from the unused fields that an
earlier commit already removed. Hopefully I have avoided removing
upstream code that had other important side effects, but it wouldn't
hurt for a WALA expert to review this change carefully.
Manu requested that we use this approach instead of adding
`@SuppressWarnings("unused")` at each affected catch block. That
seems reasonable to me, given the large number of such warnings and
the lack of likely harm from ignoring such caught exceptions.
Fixing these Javadoc comments would require adding packages to various
other packages' build paths. In some of the cases suppressed,
changing build paths in that manner would create circular build
dependencies. In other cases, it would simply add a Javadoc-motivated
dependency that does not exist for the real code, which seems
undesirable. For a few cases, the reference seems to be to types in
code we don't even have here, such as code from "android" or
"org.mozilla" packages.
These arise, for example, when Javadoc documentation on a public class
includes a @link to a private field. I can see how this would be
problematic for closed-source Java code where private items are
invisible to outsiders. However, given that WALA is open source,
nothing is truly non-visible. If the WALA documentation authors
considered non-visible references useful when explaining things,
that's fine with me.
We don't turn this warning off in all projects. Rather, we turn it
off only in projects that were producing at least one such warning.
In other words, if a project was already completely "clean" with
respect to this warning, then we leave this warning enabled for that
project.
These changes turn off Eclipse warnings for Javadoc tags without
descriptions. In some subprojects, we turn these off entirely. In
others, leave on missing-descrption checks for "@return" tags only.
We don't turn this warning off in all projects. Rather, we turn it
off only in projects that were producing at least one such warning.
In other words, if a project was already completely "clean" with
respect to this warning, then we leave this warning enabled for that
project.
Turning off these warnings is a partial declaration of Javadoc
bankruptcy. In an ideal world, we would enable and fix all of these
warnings. However, there are 576 of them. Apparently the WALA team's
implicit coding style says that omitting descriptions is OK. If
there's no intent to systematically add descriptions, then we may as
well turn off these warnings so that we can see other warnings that we
may want to fix.
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.
Note: some of these methods are decidedly nontrivial. Perhaps they
should not actually be removed? If any should be kept around, please
identify them to me. I'll revise this change to retain those methods
and simply annotate them as needed to suppress Eclipse's warning.
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.
Ben Liblit
Julian Dolby
Manu Sridharan