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.
These are all things one might consider fixing in real application
data. Java code used as test inputs, though, serves a different
purpose. Weird code is generally acceptable or even intentional.
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.
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.
Apparently this code is built using Java 1.6 under Tycho. This leads
to complaints about the Java 1.7+ "<>" generic type inference feature,
if I try to use it. Weirdly, the Eclipse GUI does not complain about
this, so apparently the Eclipse GUI is using Java 1.7 or later. I do
not understand why Tycho and the Eclipse GUI are mismatched in this
way.
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.
In general, test code may do all sorts of things that would be
considered poor style in production code. I assume that these
potentially-static methods are declared non-static by design.
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.
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 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.