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.
Julian Dolby assures me that WALA is now supposed to be using Java 8
everywhere. This covers nearly all remaining places that I can find
where an earlier Java version was still being used. (The few
exceptions are places where switching to Java 8 causes test failures.
I'll address those separately, probably by reaching out to the WALA
maintainers for help.)
These are all problems that Eclipse can detect, but that it detects no
instances of right now. Treating these as warnings instead of errors
should help prevent us from slipping backward in the future.
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 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.
Specifically, these are all warnings of the form "The
'javacProjectSettings' build entry should be set when there are project
specific compiler settings".
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.
Julian Dolby
Ben Liblit
Manu Sridharan
Manu Sridharan
Julian Dolby