Previously, the various Eclipse projects' Java configurations used
mixtures of 1.6, 1.7, and 1.8. Many were internally inconsistent,
such as requiring 1.7 in "MANIFEST.MF" but 1.6 in the Eclipse JDT
build preferences. The Travis-CI configuration tests against both 1.7
and 1.8, but does not test against 1.6.
Across all projects, the most common version was 1.7. So I'm going to
assume that 1.7 is the intended build target. This commit makes 1.7
the selected version nearly everywhere.
"com.ibm.wala.core.testdata" is the one exception. This specific
project uses a few features only found in 1.8, such as lambda
expressions. Previously, "com.ibm.wala.core.testdata" used 1.7 in
some aspects of its configuration but 1.8 in others. Now it
consistently targets 1.8. I wish this one project didn't need to be
inconsistent with the rest of WALA, but at least now it's consistent
with itself.
(Personally, I'd be happy to target 1.8 only. But my impression
across all of these configuration files is that the WALA developers
still want to be compatible with 1.7. If that is no longer a
requirement, let me know and I will adjust these changes accordingly
to target 1.8 only.)
This change eliminates 11 "There is no 'jre.compilation.profile' build
entry and the project has Java compliance preferences set" warnings
and 13 "The JRE container on the classpath is not a perfect match to
the 'JavaSE-1.7' execution environment" warnings. However, it also
adds 450 "Redundant specification of type arguments <...>" warnings
and 17 "Resource '...' should be managed by try-with-resource"
warnings. So this seems like a net step backward in my wish to reduce
WALA warnings. However, those new warnings concern Java 1.7 language
features that we were not previously using to good effect in projects
that targeted 1.6. If we all agree that we can now target 1.7
instead, then we can use these helpful features as the newly-added
warnings suggest. So I call that a step in the right direction.
In general, the WALA code base is not really ready for nullness
checking. It would be nice if we got there some day, but I'm not
planning to take that on now or any time soon. Until then, it's not
useful to warn about missing @NonNullByDefault declarations on WALA
packages.
See also older commit 7b6811b.
Eclipse Mars Service Release 2 finds 45 potential null pointer accesses
across WALA's various Eclipse projects. Eclipse ignores these by
default, but any individual user may have changed their personal Eclipse
configuration to treat them as warnings or errors. Thus, some people
will find that the code builds while others find that it fails. Better
to explicitly use a known-good configuration.
In the long run someone should inspect these cases one-by-one and fix
them where appropriate. But that is probably better managed as part of a
larger effort to tidy up nulls in WALA. I'm not planning to take that on
now or any time soon, though, so this is a better setup for now.
Ben Liblit
Manu Sridharan
sjfink