Boxing a primitive using the constructor ("new Integer(4)") always
creates a distinct new boxed instance. That's rarely what you need,
and in fact all of those constructors have been deprecated in Java 9.
Using the static "valueOf" method instead ("Integer.valueOf(4)") can
give better performance by reusing existing instances. You no longer
get a unique boxed object, but generally that's OK.
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.
Of course, doing nothing isn't always the right behavior. Sometimes a
previously-unhandled value is truly unexpected and one should fail by
throwing an exception. It may not always be clear whether an
exception or doing nothing is the right choice. For some `switch`
statements affected by this commit, I initially guessed that throwing
an exception was the right default behavior, but was proven wrong when
doing so caused WALA regression test failures. That's strong evidence
that the unmatched values were not really unexpected, but merely
should have been handled by doing nothing as before.
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.
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.
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.
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.
* 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.
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.
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.
Julian Dolby
Ben Liblit
Manu Sridharan