Using constructor references apparently pulls in something involving
nullness annotations. However, we don't actually build with a jar
file that defines those annotations, so this leads to Eclipse build
failures. I don't know the right way to add such a jar file to our
current configuration mishmash of Ant, Maven, and Eclipse. So the
easier thing to do is just disable annotation-based nullness analysis.
I doubt we were getting any benefit from such an analysis anyway,
given that WALA itself doesn't use those annotations at all.
Most of these are harmless, and are best fixed simply by removing the
redundant check or assignment. The one in FlowType.compareBlocks,
however, revealed a real problem. This code checks for nullness of
`a` *after* having called a method on `a`. Assuming that `a` can
indeed be `null` here, the check must come first to avoid a
`NullPointerException`.
In several places, I saw code of this form:
if (thing == null)
assert thing != null : ... ;
I honestly don't understand the purpose of that `if` statement. Why
not just have the `assert` statement there directly? I removed the
seemingly irrelevant `if` statements in these cases, but if this is
some intentional pattern, please explain it to me.
In a few places where nullness is statically known but non-obvious,
add assert statements to point out what's going on to help future
developers.
Upgrade future such warnings to errors to keep us moving in a cleaner
direction.
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.
One such annotation was unnecessary because the thing it was
suppressing no longer happens. Any future unnecessary warning
suppressions of this kind will now be treated as errors.
The other annotations were unnecessary because the corresponding
warnings have been disabled entirely in the Eclipse projects'
configurations. There seems to be no way to tell Eclipse to treat
these as anything other than "info" diagnostics in the future, so
that's how they will remain.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Julian Dolby
Ben Liblit
Manu Sridharan
Manu Sridharan
sjfink
dolby-oss